Purgatory
by wild spanish eyes
Summary: Seven members of the Cullen family and seven deadly sins. Coincidence? Edward has lived too long to believe in coincidence. The death of each Cullen relayed by Edward to his newborn bride. Each one is a deadly sin. After BD.
1. Canto 1: Conspiracy

**Disclaimer: Esme, Edward, Bella, Alice, Jasper, Rosalie, Carlisle, Emmet, Jacob, and Renesmee all belong to Stephanie Meyer, but if the world were perfect, Edward would belong to me...**

**Second Disclaimer: (just in case) The Divine Comedy and every horrible detail of Hell belongs to Dante...take it please. I don't think I would ever want to claim that!**

**(_But we're starting with the happy little ironic fact that Book One of the Divine Comedy (Inferno) is dedicated to Isabella!)_**

* * *

"No!"

What she was asking was absurd—seven tales that weren't mine to tell.

"Please?" she begged innocently as she looked up at me from underneath her thick eyelashes.

The amazing depth behind those angelic eyes had always shocked me. Before her turning, they had tortured me with the unspoken mysteries of the only mind that I could not penetrate, and now, tinted crimson still from the bloodlust that had become her newest penance, those cryptic eyes sang of the unfathomable sacrifice that she had made…the death that she had welcomed to be seated here today among her new family with our child asleep in her arms. I owed her my entire existence.

My breath stopped in my throat, the taste of her disappearing momentarily from my tongue and I glared at her, suddenly all too aware of what she had been trying to describe that fated night in Port Angeles when she had accused me of dazzling people. She was the perfect pupil, it seemed. I had to remind myself to breath again. More than a moment without her scent was agonizing.

What she was asking me to do was worse than agonizing.

She knew something of each one's death. They had all shared some small part of themselves. She had every right to know, of course. She was a Cullen now—a member of the family, and a carrier of her own horrific story—but not through my mind or from my lips. What she desired was a right granted only by those who had suffered each gruesome detail. Only they could justly relay to her the stories of their own journey into immortality.

But this was not the crutch that I would be able to fall back upon. I didn't need to read minds to know this. I could tell from each solemn face as I glanced around the room that permission had been granted long before I had entered. My clever Bella had instigated her own coup d'etat of sorts. I smoldered with resentment at the conspiracy behind it all.

Her hand was suddenly there on my shoulder, her expression pure and pleading. She lifted the shield that had always existed between us and her thoughts invaded my mind, absorbing every space that I had reserved for objection. They were memories of love and lust…of meadows, and feathers and endless nights without the need for sleep. My breathing increased. The heartbeat of our child fluttered between us as she brushed lips that would only seem warm to our kind against mine. She let her shield close around her once again.

"Alice says you lived them all…each death." Concern flashed briefly across her pale face, searching for confirmation in mine. She found it, and then and her voice was the most beautiful melody whispered in my ear. "Emmett tells me that only you can make me see the importance of each one…that you have a different way of understanding things."

So this was the motive behind their treachery…a hasty confession spoken years ago to ease the suffering of my dying brother. I frowned at her and pulled away reluctantly. She let me go, but I did not miss the worry that darted across her scarlet eyes. I could not bear to see her distraught. I brought my hand up to brush her hair away from her face and she smiled, relieved.

My perception of the gift that Carlisle had given each of us was quite unique, formulated around his undying religious beliefs and my obsession with the morbid descriptions of Dante Alighieri. I had long ago created in my penitent mind a sort of Divine Comedy portrayed exclusively by my family, and only made stronger by the arrival of Alice and Jasper.

Seven members in my family…seven inescapable deaths…seven souls trapped between existence and nonexistence…

The fact that Dante brought to the world's attention seven deadly sins seemed like an astounding coincidence…and I had lived much too long to believe in coincidence.

I had confessed this half created theory to only one soul. I had admitted with embarrassment which sins I believed were already represented, and which ones had yet to manifest themselves to only one half conscious mind and I glared this bear-like brother now with contempt. He met my eyes, amused. Of course he had told Rosalie. Of course she had told anyone who would listen. Of course my entire family knew by now…even my newborn wife. I allowed a growl to escape my lips. She silenced it with a kiss.

It was true. I knew each death well—most likely better than any one of my loved ones. The memory of the pain never faded, but the memory of all things human faded gradually with each victim's concept of humanity. The recollections they each had of their tragic turnings were too strong for them to relive completely with human minds and too trivial for them to remember entirely as a vampire.

I, on the other hand, had seen each one of them in every grisly detail with my vampire mind. It seemed a sick irony during those times that each of those I came to love were forced to relive their own death again and again throughout the pain of the conversion, and that I, with the unfortunate ability to hear their thoughts, was forced in turn to die their deaths alongside them. It seemed an even crueller fate that, of the two deaths that I did not have to witness, one was given to me in an inevitable projection of emotions, and the other came to me years later in the mind of a murderer.

What my beautiful bride could not understand was that to tell each tale—to pick each dark detail out of the deepest regions of each mind—was to force every being in this room to relive their last moments again, and to force me to die seven times. I looked around with chagrin. Each pale figure understood this fact. Each was willing to bear the individual earthquakes in their sanity to share with her their lives before the darkness, but the ultimate decision lay with me--the teller of the tales and the bearer of the final anguish.

I clenched my jaw and allowed my eyes to close as I accepted the inevitable. I could never deny her anything, but I did not want to see the pain in her eyes as she too became a part of each tragedy. Instead, I glanced over at Carlisle. He stared back, patient and knowing. His expression spoke volumes without words, and the message was simple. They had all given me their deaths…their stories were mine to tell. I sighed, defeated.

I began, of course, with the sins of the father…


	2. Sins of the Father

_He stares with guarded eyes at me and in them there is something more than his consent…a look of fascinated trust…a patient understanding that surpasses the limits of the term Father. He reads my face as easily as I read his tranquil thoughts. He cannot read minds. He does not see the future, and emotions are as complex and confusing to him as they are to everyone with the exception of his most recent son, and yet he is the center of our world._

_He feels the pride of a leader. The power of one who has become the only control in a place where the incontrollable dwell. His children rely on him to be their rock—their stability in a world based purely on instinct. He bears this penance with caution, because the pride of power always comes before chaos. He knows this. He remembers this well. _

_His hand moves to the shoulder of the woman who he calls lover and I call Mother…hands that have saved lives, and taken them in turn. Hands that have loved passionately and compassionately…hands that have been folded in prayer…trembling in fear…gentle in love…and clenched in fury. Hands that took my wasted mortal body and created a creature capable of love beyond all understandable limits. Hands that gave his daughter eternal beauty, his son eternal strength, and his wife a new life that time and disease could not destroy. _

_He feels the pride of a creator. The arrogance of one who has five times defied the will of the God that he had once been taught to fear. He has granted immortality…strength beyond all human understanding…stealth to outrun time itself, and senses to rival any predator the Earth has ever provided. He denies this emotion violently, because the pride of arrogance can bring only destruction. Of this, he has already borne witness. _

_He casts a glance at his flawless children and he understands them all completely. He basks in the sunlight that each has brought to his existence. He cherishes the radiance of his golden daughter…the unbreakable spirit of the dark haired son that she chose as her lover…the perpetual shine of his gifted dancing clairvoyant…the pained, strategic tolerance of her fair haired love…the thoughtless self sacrifice of his newest daughter…the fount of patience and knowledge that he discovered in his first beloved creation. His eyes stop on the tiny, living, breathing miracle that is the granddaughter that he could never have hoped for in his centuries of life, and his compassion is a flame that lights the room. _

_He feels the pride of a father. The satisfaction of one who has carried his loved ones away from the violence inherent within them and created a bond so strong that words fail to describe it. He's raised his children not to follow, but to lead. He's watched from a distance as they have silently left their mark in a world that was meant to move on without them. The trials and triumphs…the tears and the laughter…the failures and the innumerable successes all begin and end with him. _

_He accepts this responsibility without protest, just as he accepted his role as a son to a father of lies in his time before the darkness, though always with the knowledge that even the pride of a father can lead to the humiliation of the Sinner. He understands this. He lived it once, long ago. _

_His eyes stray from my daughter. They find a place on the floor in front of him as he contemplates the guilt that blazes inside him. It is a guilt of centuries—a repentance that makes him the ideal contradiction. A predator perfectly evolved to be the scourge of man, dedicated in his entirety to saving them and teaching humanity to the inhuman. A child taught by a mortal father to pray to an immortal one. Now he is the immortal father of those who were never taught to pray. _

_I contemplate the pale unmoving figure in my sights…my companion in innumerable unending debates…the perfect model of tolerance that we all one day hope to become…the driving force behind everything we hold dear, and the voice of reason to end my insanity. What is silent in the father speaks in the son, and though my heart no longer beats, it swells with gratitude and unbelieving respect as I begin my Father's tale… _


	3. Pride 1

**(This one kind of got away from me and before I knew it, it was 3000 words, so I'm splitting it up...sorry, but it _is_ the patriarch.)**

"He remembers the time before his transformation through a thin veil of flame. His human life was a canvas of scents and sounds more than anything else. He remembers the desolate sobs of the condemned that echoed from the pits under the streets of London and the pleading of the innocent as they stumbled through the crowded streets with hands bound, headed toward the pyres. The sickeningly sweet smell of burning children still lingers in his mind. He looks upon those memories with horror because it was he who tied their hands and lit the fires.

Carlisle's father was a man of God—a shepherd of the people in a world full of wolves and the pinnacle of power and authority. He believed that he was the most important key to the elimination of all evil—that God spoke through him, alerting his faithful disciple to the true monsters within the flock—and in the time of Cromwell, the monsters were rampant. They prowled the streets at night in search of the weak, and it was Carlisle's father who unveiled them all. He had a talent for discovering the sinners among the pure, and a sinister obsession for purification by fire. Under his charismatic hand, London smoldered.

It was the duty of a son to witness as they burned. Mothers screamed for their children—reached for them with blackened arms and searched for them with eyes that could no longer see. Husbands and wives burned together, clinging desperately to one another as their blazing bodies fused and the flames made them one in death. He saw their corpses again and again in his nightmares, but Carlisle remained faithful to his father, who was the true justice among all of the sinners and monsters of his world. To him, the proud son, there was no greater God than the man who gave him life, and there was no greater glory than to inherit the keys to his kingdom.

It was with this foolish, arrogant pride that Carlisle came into his inheritance. The voice of God, it seemed, was a more difficult job than ever imagined, and when the father began to show signs of mortality, his responsibility passed to the son. It was a burden Carlisle took up with fervent desire.

But God did not seem to speak to him. He did not whisper in his ear the names of those who were to burn in the fires of redemption. Try as he may, Carlisle could not look upon any soul and perceive inside them the evil that his father had so easily seen, and he was consumed with humiliation at the fact that power did not seem to pass as easily as status in London society.

He delved into endless study of the monsters that he was supposed to unveil. He became an expert of sorts on the folklore of the vampire, the witch, and the werewolf and yet, the more Carlisle read, the less he saw of their possible existence in London. His father's faithful people continued to follow, and the patriarch watched, the disappointment mounting, from his place in the new oblivion that illness had created for him. It was from that oblivion in a delirium one night, that Carlisle's father revealed to him the truth behind his mask of lies.

In the tones of one who had gone mad from fever, his father confessed that the ones who had burned—those who had become the contents of Carlisle's most horrifying nightmares—were nothing more than adulterers, fornicators, and Catholics—the necessary victims in a Protestant war against immorality. It was him, ordained by God to decide their fates, who had created the fear of monsters.

His father admitted in his raving that he had seen from afar the true creatures of the night. They were an evil that could not be eliminated or even understood, best left alone. It was the immoral that could be changed and fought. It was them who had to burn under the guise of the mythical.

With the images of the innocent melting away in his mind, Carlisle escaped from his father's bedside. His beliefs shattered, he began a hopeless rambling across the city and back again, through the disease ravaged streets of the poorest communities with the guilt of a hundred murders on his conscience. He prayed for the thief on the corner, or the cut throat in the shadows to take his life. He would have welcomed an end to the horrible turn that his life had so suddenly taken. How could he not have seen this?

It was completely by accident that he discovered the true coven, or so he thought at the time. In his wanderings through one of the worst parts of the city, where disease was still rampant, and bodies still lie unclaimed in the barren streets, Carlisle saw from a distance, the living dead.

It was a waif of a being, so thin and so white that, had it been lying in the street instead of travelling through it, the cart would have surely taken it away to be burned with the rest of the corpses. It moved with a stealth and a grace that was not mortally possible, and it was possessed of the strange, fragile beauty that brought to mind his studies of immortals. He knew it was a vampire at once.

Carlisle would later discover that everything that occurred over the course of the next few weeks had been completely intentional. When he became a vampire, he understood the impossibility of encountering an immortal who does not wish to be seen. He would learn, too late of course, that this particular vampire had lost the mortal he loved to the fires created by his father, and that he had been observing the son for quite some time, contemplating a revenge that would fit the crime.

He knows know that he was allowed to see the vampire that fated night. He realizes only now that he was allowed to follow into the sewers where its coven dwelled. He became utterly nocturnal in the following weeks, waiting for the wraithlike creature to emerge; following it through the shadows…he was even able to watch it feed, though it brought back the images of the children at the stake.

He buried those memories again. Those were now his days as a follower. He was a changed man. He would no longer hide in the shadow of his father. He would no longer watch passively as the innocent burned. He was a greater man…a more clever man than his father. He had discovered what his father had told him was impossible, and now he would watch as the _true_ monsters burned.

With triumph, Carlisle gathered the crowds of the faithful…those who had so easily been stirred into a fervor at every burning, and those who had gone so long now without a judgment that they followed with an eagerness that bordered on morbidity. With pride he led them to the mouth of the sewers where he knew that the true immortals would exit to feed. With anticipation he waited to prove to each person there that he was a greater man than his father. With blind faith the crowd of dozens waited, torches lit and weapons ready.

They all fell directly into the hands of the elder.

It would take Carlisle two centuries to return and learn the story of what really happened that night from the point of view of those who had been a part of the coven. They would admit to him that it was all their leader desired to exit and to find the mob there waiting for him…to discover the target of his revenge leading it. His plan had always been to destroy them all…every last foolish human there…and to leave the son of his enemy bleeding, with the venom eating away at him from the inside.

It was perfect.

In the chaos of the chase, he had outrun the crowd. He had with him a dagger and a small supply of wooden stakes, but it was with the strength of youth that he intended to wear down this seemingly frail, ancient creature. He fought back the jubilation that he felt when he realized that the vampire was cornered, and he closed in with confidence.

It is only with his vampire mind that Carlisle can understand what happened next. His human eyes could not watch the elder advance. His human nerves did not even have the time to feel before they were severed. Before he even had the opportunity to see his attacker again, he was on the ground and bleeding. Two of the men who had followed him closest were dead in pools of their own blood in front of his eyes and a third was screaming in the distance as the monster ended his life as well. He was gone. It had all been so impossibly fast.

Carlisle knew that he had been mortally injured, but it wasn't until he felt the burning in the wounds on his chest that he began to suspect what he had read about vampires in some of his studies. In minutes it was a fire within him. He knew that if his father found him, his fate would be a pyre in the center of the city, and so he left the two dead men where they lay and made his way out into the alley once again.

What he saw there stopped his breath.


	4. Pride 2

The men and women who had accompanied Carlisle to witness his triumph were all there in the alley. The rest of the coven had exited behind the elder and torn them all to pieces while he was absorbed in his arrogant pursuit…every last innocent person.

Their blood was on his hands alone. He fell to his knees. He would have liked to pray, but the pain inside of him was spreading and the blood came from his wounds in great gushes. He tried to rise again and found his legs would not comply. He acted then only to save his own life.

Just off the alleyway, he found a small cellar. He summoned just enough strength to drag himself to the opening, hoping that the blood trail that he was leaving would not give him away.

It was there in the darkness, with rotting potatoes mixing with his own blood that he discovered the true pain of undeath. It was a burning like he had never imagined…not in an entire lifetime of watching people writhe on their own pyres and burn away to cinders. He understood their screams now, but he bore his own penance in silence. It was the fear of discovery that kept him from yelling out, and later, the pain became his punishment for so many lives lost.

Still, there was a point just before it began to fade away that Carlisle would have cried out. The agony surpassed fear and even guilt, and he was on the verge of screaming when a very familiar voice sounded from just outside his tiny dark Hell. It was the voice of his father. He had come to the gruesome scene in search of his son. His father was not an unintelligent man. He had seen true vampires before, and he must have guessed that if his son was not among the dead, then it was the undead who had claimed him.

Carlisle's last human memory was of his father's voice renouncing his name.

There was a moment before the pain had left him completely—when he could think clearly but still not move—that he had time to contemplate what had brought him into this Hell. He thought of the pride he had felt for his father who had taught him nothing in the end and had denied him as easily as one denies a beggar in the streets. He thought of the pride he had felt as a leader of men…as a God among his flock…and he realized with utter dejection that his pride had brought him to this point. He could see no other solution now than to risk eternal damnation and to end his own life.

Of course, by this point, Carlisle was a vampire, and a strong one. He did not have the slightest idea how to kill himself, or even to begin to try. He tried everything. He leapt from buildings…bridges…cliffs. Like a feline, he landed unwillingly on his feet each time. He threw himself into the ocean, and it was there that he discovered that he had lost the necessity to breathe. He broke countless blades, arrows, anything with an edge trying to puncture his unbeating heart. He wanted nothing more in the world than to fulfill his father's latest desire…to find a way to no longer exist.

And suddenly, after every other option had been painfully eliminated, it was to his father that Carlisle turned his final hopes. In his attempts to end his torture, he had violently avoided one final course of action. It was the one end that he feared above all, having witnessed dozens, if not hundreds of victims in their final excruciating moments—death by fire. He did not trust himself to remain immobile as he burned away. He needed someone who understood the heat and could make a pyre sturdy enough to hold him in all his newfound strength…and his father was no stranger to the flames.

The scent of his father's blood was maddening. It was a testimony to his utter self loathing that he held back the urge to drink. If everything else failed, he told himself, starvation at least would win out in the end. Still, the desire to kill his own father sickened him and forced him into the shadows of the small parsonage where the old man had exiled himself to live out the last of his days.

It was from those shadows that Carlisle first lay his vampire eyes upon the sick old man that had once been his strong, Godlike father. He watched as fear immobilized the frail figure where he stood. After so little time apart, he had not recognized his own son. With the scent of human blood burning in his lungs, Carlisle asked him…begged him to take mercy upon him and to end his life.

If he was injured by how quick and emotionless his father's reply was, he hid it well.

It took two days to make the preparations. His father created a pyre outside of a small cottage in the countryside while Carlisle stayed safely away from the human populace. An outcrop of stone was to serve as the pyre to hold him in the flames. Even then, he knew that it would not hold him long, but he was hoping that the pain of the transformation had given him enough tolerance to keep him still until death overtook him.

The crowd that would have gathered around to chant as he burned had all been murdered by the ancient vampire and his coven, and so it was without an audience that Carlisle stepped onto the pyre to be burned to death by his own father.

Fire is one of the few elements that can affect us, of course. Affect us, but not kill us…only finish the job. It was amazingly painless to burn. He watched with curiosity and failing hope as his clothes melted away and his skin turned black. He felt nothing more than a vague relief as the flames lapped at his eyes, taking away his sight for what he hoped was the last time. The last image he remembers before his eyesight failed him was of his father solemnly adding kindling to the fire.

The fire didn't kill him. Carlisle burned for two days. It turned him into a charred, corpselike being. It rendered him immobile and it weakened him considerably. If his father had known to tear him apart at that moment, it all could have come to an end, but he knew nothing of the strength of vampires. He stared, stony eyed at what he thought was his dead son, and did the only thing that reason told him was correct…he buried him.

His father placed the charred remains into the coffin that he had already purchased for himself. In a gesture that the son is still unable to comprehend, his father had taken the cross from behind his pulpit and he placed it into the coffin with the blackened body. He arranged for a man to come and dig the grave, and then he went into the cottage without tears and without even a second glance…it was a strangely emotionless scene.

Of course it took only hours to recover. Instinct and blood lust caused Carlisle to rise from the grave even before the gravedigger could arrive. It was tardiness that saved that man's life. In Carlisle's weakened state, resistance was not a possibility. He did not realize that fact, however, as he entered into the cottage where he knew his father would be, just as he did not recognize the sweet scent of recent death on the wind. He entered the cottage in a haze of bloodlust and desperation.

And found his father hanging dead from the rafters.

He had scratched five words into the small table that lay tilted underneath his dangling feet.

"_Pride goeth before the fall."_

Carlisle has lived centuries since that moment. His travels and his studies have taught him much and given him a family. He has learned to deny the pride that became his folly so early in life and embrace the compassion that is so strong inside him today, but he has never forgotten the wise last words of his father. It is the lesson that has cost him the most to learn, and so it is always near him, etched into the back of the cross that his father left in his dead son's coffin…the cross that now accompanies our family wherever we go, always reminding us of lessons learned…

Pride goeth before the fall.


	5. The First Level

_Silence in the room as they contemplate the tragedy that created the father, and the sin that brought him to his knees. Silence as the pain reflects in every eye…in the beautiful burgundy eyes of my love. Stillness as the reality of a past so long ago melts malevolently into the present. No one moves…except her. _

_She is dancing again… _

_She carries herself with the fluid movements of a practiced dancer…spinning and twirling and transforming the room into a stage that exists in her mind alone. She lives her life in measures of melodies and possibilities that only she can understand…bound only to the rhythm of other people's futures and the silence of her own mysterious beginnings. _

_They admire her grace and they wish for a moment to join her in her secret eternity where the music never ends. _

_She is playing mother momentarily, as completely at peace as the child asleep in her arms. Behind such an innocent barricade, the future becomes as much of an enigma as the past, and she is left with her life lived in the moment, and the unending rhythm of the happiness that carries her into a destiny that for her is already clear. She is the passive observer of uncertain fortunes…the watcher of worlds… my Sister, the pixie. _

_They depend upon her strange talent and they wish for a moment to understand as well as her, the tangled web of their own interminable fates. _

_Her lips curl into a smile and her smile paints the room with hesitant joy. Under her melodic influence, life is a barrage of sunlight and purity and sweet perfume interrupted at times by bloodlust and violence, but always ending well. The melody that intertwines itself within her life never seems to slow, the haunting places within the song having been played out in the dark…the times that her mind has so graciously rejected. And so the dance continues. _

_They covet her unconditional joy and they wish for a moment to view the world in such colorful bliss and with such vividly beautiful certainty. _

_Her lips part seductively and they rest upon those of my golden haired Brother, stealing the empty gaze from his face and filling his eyes with a longing that is nothing close to that for battle or blood. She stares intently into those eyes, taking him with her to the place where strength has carried her, where freedom falls like rain around them both and the air sings of solitude. _

_He envies her beautiful illusions, and he wishes for a moment to hide inside of her…in this place where seduction comes natural, like the cries of battle for him…the pleasure that precedes the pain. _

_She smiles and walks away from him…forgets that she's wandering at all…A mind so lost in thought that time disappears. A figure so far removed from the shadow that sight is both an impossibility and an inevitability. She lives a life with no one to accuse her…no reason to argue…no sins to answer for….no past to atone for. _

_I envy her freedom and I wish for a moment to escape the sins of a past that binds my hands. _

_Her tune takes her away from me, but her voice is gentle in my mind, granting her permission to gather the pieces of her scrambled past and to assemble them as I may…it's all the same to her. I watch as she passes my child back to her newest sister and my thoughts fall savagely on the monster that hunted them both. I scowl as images flash through my mind of a desperate flight to a dance studio to save my beautiful wife. There had been no one there to save my sister… _

_With contrasting images of what might have been for both of them echoing in my head, the pieces of my Sister's story fall into place around me… _


	6. Envy 1

She's wandered through so many decades without a past to guide her. Her family has the luxury of the ability to dwell on their pasts…brood over their sins…rely on the wisdom that comes with the discoveries and mistakes of youth, but she is trapped in a form of limbo that no one understands.

She watches with longing as her sister revels in the beauty of her former youth…as her lover goes to great pains to avoid his past mistakes, and her newest sister goes to the same lengths to always remember. She envies our ability to take refuge in memory, whether good or bad, and she desperately yearns to recall just one small moment…enough to build a refuge of her own.

The story of Alice's turning is mine to tell just as much as it is hers…it could never be told from her point of view. The few memories that she possesses come to her only in vague, dark pieces in the moments when her instincts are the strongest. The only certain details of her human life came first to me in the mind of the deplorable creature that had hunted her.

They came in quick frozen flashes in our make-shift baseball field where we had all first laid eyes upon the monster that had brought so much horror to my sister, and would bring even more to my family from that point on. I was not paying attention, of course, and so the images were nothing more than random pictures until much later when his final, well-deserved agony revealed to me his memories of the only other prey to ever escape him.

His desperate thoughts as my brothers pulled me off of him and tore him to pieces gave me the twisted details of the end of Alice's story. The public library and the department of records in the small town of Biloxi, Mississippi gave her the beginning. She poured over the pages of birth certificates…formal internment papers…official documents…newspaper articles, and too many death certificates. Slowly, as if she were reading a book she had already read but did not fully comprehend, the pieces of her mortal life and her transformation began to fill in the tabula raza that was her mind…

The fragile human she used to be was Mary Alice Brandon, born relatively high on the social scale of their tiny town. Her parents had more than they could possibly need and yet they had fallen victim to the jealousy that came so easily to small town life—the product of never having been exposed to the world outside their miniature haven.

What they desired more than anything was to become the family by which their small town standard was set—to have the perfect wife…to grow the perfect lawn…to raise the perfect children. They had appeared in the social section of their insignificant newspaper countless times in an attempt to display that perfection. They counted this among their greatest triumphs. Their tiny daughter, however, did not fit into their flawless scheme.

Alice's visions were not as controlled then as they are now. They came to her in horrifying, violent convulsions. By the time she was old enough to attend school, her parents had already turned her into a ward of the state. Her diagnosis was a bout of seizures so strong that they produced hallucinations. They told themselves that she would be better cared for in a professional facility. The reality was that their desire to be better than all those around them far outweighed their daughter's health.

They told her that it was for her own good.

They told the world that she was dead.

From the age of six, she knew nothing more than darkness and insanity as she was moved from one nightmare to the next. The sanitariums of the 1920's were not the sterile places of rest that exist today. They were gloomy, soiled stains on the face of civilization, and their sole purpose was to dispose of those who were deemed not fit for society. Those who were not mad when they entered slowly became so inside. Those who were not violent gradually succumbed to the basest of human desires…the craving to cause as much pain as they were in.

It was into this terrifying environment that Alice entered, frail, and frightened, but still very sane. It was there, under the constant threat of the savage and the sadistic, where she created her secret world full of music and magic. She retreated into that world when her size proved a disadvantage and the blows became unceasing. It was there where she suffered the terrible tortures that taught her not to sleep, and it was there, as she lay curled into a ball hoping to die, where a vampire came into her life.

He found her sometime after she had already escaped far into herself. She must have been catatonic and very near death. He recognized her beauty almost immediately in spite of the fact that she was painted in a mask of bruises and broken dreams. He saved her life that day, but he replaced her daily suffering with years of impenetrable darkness. Alice's fate was sealed inside a tiny cell where the light of day was nothing more than a memory inside her mind. He kept her there for many years—his untouchable living porcelain doll.

The records list him as a Doctor Thomas Hayden. Alice tried to trace his history, but could find no one by that name before his time in the sanatarium. The pictures that came from the mind of James portrayed him as a plain being, ancient already before his turning. His silver hair stuck out at odd angles, and his dull tan eyes left no question of how he was able to live undetected among humans. He was the director of his tiny, hidden corner of Hell, and he was a collector.

He gathered those to him that possessed the qualities that he most desired—youth, strength, charisma—but it was mostly beauty that he coveted. It was not the physical beauty of his pretty human pets, but that of their souls. He must have had a talent for seeking out those who could be labeled "truly special" inside. He kept them all _safe_ in the dark of his own little cells. When the tracker discovered them both, the vampire held a collection of only three. They played through James's memories at our first meeting.

One was a mouse haired girl of about ten years old. James remembered her in front of a row of rusted beds filled with frightened children. A second was a very young boy who sat in rapture with a row of spoons before him, all bent in strange, distorted ways. The last was Alice, of course—only reflected in the mind of the hunter, I did not recognize her. I thought she was another sick patient—a boy. She was fragile—thin to the point of death. Her face, her arms, her shoulders…they were all badly bruised, and her hair was shaved nearly completely. Death certificates show that Hayden's human favorites tended to expire with the youth that he so greatly envied. An extraordinary amount of patients seemed to pass away mysteriously when they reached the ages of adolescence. Whether that was the time when childhood beauty began to fade, or that was the age at which the soul died in his institution will never be known, but the lifespan of his collection seemed to be suspiciously limited.

Alice was the only exception. He seemed to envy everything she represented. He reveled in her flawless pale complexion and he wished more than anything for that fleeting beauty. He watched her in her unmoving, unblinking escape, and he envied the world she had created for herself alone. He listened to her breath as it slowed sometimes to the point of stopping completely, and he craved the intimacy that she already shred with death. But it was her talent—the bain of her entire existence—that finally drove him mad with desire. He observed her as she writhed and convulsed, and revealed to him pieces of his future in a slow, choked whisper. He listened for hours on end unable to think of anything more than what he could do with a gift so powerful.

His mind was overwhelmed with the puzzle of taking this power from her. In his desperation, he must have begun to take her blood little by little. By this point, he could not have been in his right mind. It must have begun as an attempt to absorb her talent, but it soon evolved into an obsession that weakened his resistance. He had to have come close to killing her many times. Alice lived her last years in a state of semiconsciousness as he slowly took every last drop of her will to live. He thought of nothing else for a very long time.

She had been dying long before he realized what he was doing to her. His anger at himself was matched only by his need to know that his dark child would live on, and so, with every fiber in his petrified body resisting what he knew he had to do, he took her one night into the forest outside the sanatarium grounds and tried to make her go.

She couldn't move. She could barely breath, and it was at this point that a cruel twist of fate brought her dying scent to one who was hunting nearby. It was this image of her—so very close to death in so many ways—that became the tracker's last thought as he died at the hands of my brothers.

Alice was dazed and scarred from the vampire's nightly samplings. There was no sign of the light in her eyes that you see today. There was no sign of recognition at all—it was as if she were pleading for an end…challenging him, and perhaps that is what she was doing. She couldn't possibly have sensed him near, but she had other ways of seeing.

In his memory, she was limp in the arms of her captor and torturer of so many years. The memory had flashed by impossibly quickly. The thought had been impossibly fast, and there had been no movement...no feeling-- nothing more than faded images, almost like photographs. But there had been scent.

And the scent of her was maddening in his mind.


	7. Envy 2

After that moment, it was as if nothing more existed in the tracker's world. He recognized the challenge immediately, watching as the ancient placed his prophetic little doll lovingly on a mossy patch of ground, goading her to move, finally snatching her up protectively when he recognized the threat of a tracker and hurrying her back to her place of refuge where the night never ended. James had never understood the attraction that humans could hold for his kind beyond the call of their blood, but he envied the discipline of those who were able to overcome the urge to drink...those who turned their prey into pets. It seemed so very humanlike.

He had no need for pets. He wanted nothing more than to feel the flow of blood over his lips from this particular animal. His tongue yearned to taste her. The ancient vampire could never have understood, of course, just how much his emaciated little puppet had affected the tracker.

Alice knew, and she smiled weakly, keeping her silence and welcoming the death that awaited her at last.

Hayden had taken to remaining quietly in the corner of her cell as she whiled away her last hours lost in her secret place. He watched the mysterious smile turn her hollow face into something almost angelic, and he puzzled over it. He did could not know that the tracker was also contemplating that same smile, turning it slowly in his mind into a grimace of fear as he drained her of every luscious drop of blood.

_She_ knew, of course, and her eyes drifted slowly over to the place where he had perched in the shadows.

In a demonstration of the overconfidence that centuries of successful hunting had given him, James decided to make his continued presence known. He took one of the patients in their bed one night, hoping that Hayden would react and create a more entertaining challenge. It was a glorious bloodbath, and the patient's screams almost satisfied his strangely increased hunger. He had no idea what desperate measures that the vampire would take to save his child and her enigmatic talent.

Her captor waited until he was sure that the perpetrator of this horrible crime was far enough away for the moment, and then he placed his other two pets in the general population with the hopes that their scents would be lost in the chaos of the sweat and other bodily fluids that came with the day to day life of the insane. He did not know how to escape a tracker whose sense of smell could lead him to anything, anywhere, and so he did the most difficult thing that he had ever done in his existence.

He wrapped himself, and his helpless little doll in the sodden sheets of the one that James had killed the night before. Then, with his throat burning like he had never remembered it could, the two of them slipped slowly away on the wagon that carried the mutilated body of the first victim to the cemetery. He could only hope it would give them a large enough head start to escape entirely.

Alice did not protest. The visions she had of her own death had not changed.

The tracker discovered their clever ruse too late, of course, and his temper screamed for some form of revenge before the hunt began again. The two children the vampire had left behind served him well. The little girl became beautiful in her mask of defiance as she stood in defense of the children around her, watching the hunter with hate in her eyes. It was this quality, without a doubt, that had drawn Hayden to her in the first place. He made sure that she was the last one in the ward full of innocents to die. The boy only looked up at him from his row of spoons with serenity. He smiled wisely as the tracker broke his neck.

He continued south, where his sixth sense had told him they had gone.

Hayden succeeded in eluding the tracker for nearly a month. He moved quickly from shelter to shelter, stealing clothing, supplies, food for his frail hostage…watching with waning hope as her condition worsened. Alice's vision of her death had changed not long after she had seen the demise of her two fellow captors. She had cried through the convulsions as she watched her life expanding painfully into days again…months…years and monotonous years. She was too devastated to hide it from him. That was the day she stopped eating.

He existed off of the small animals that he could find in close proximity, not wanting to leave her side for even a moment. He was acutely aware that she was slowly yet successfully lessening her lifespan again to days, and there was only one appalling thing he could think of to prolong it. The tracker was always moments behind them. If he stopped moving for even an hour, it seemed, the scent of him on the wind would force them to flee again.

Finally, when Hayden was certain she could not travel any more…when her breath hitched in a throat that was parched from her self enforced fasting and he knew that she would not last the hour, he found a place with the cliffs at his back to defend their position. There, he took one last look at her palid mortal frame…the blush of her cheeks…the breeze through the sleek black hair that was only now becoming long enough to be feminine once again.

He bent one last time to caress her neck, and finally performed the act that he had both feared and dreamed of since the day he had seen her.

Alice did not scream. Her life had been a barrage of pain and she knew well how to escape from it—even a pain as great as this. She escaped into the shelter of her invisible world while the venom burned it's way quickly through her emaciated body. It was her silence that probably saved her life. The tracker had caught their scent, of course.

He waited downwind, planning to attack when the old one left her to hunt, enjoying, for the moment, the delicious scent of her that was carried to him on the breeze. It wasn't until too late that he recognized the change in her blood. It was mixing somehow...disappearing. He acted without thinking, charging into the sheltered clearing completely driven by his rage. The old one had turned her!

It did not take long to overpower him. He was blind with the grief of what he had done. The tracker disposed of him easily, and then, without a second glance at the newborn who had become the center of his attention for so many weeks, he disappeared into the forest in disgust.

His body still burned when the pain finally faded and Alice opened her eyes to a new life. She didn't notice. She had never seen fire before.

It is here where her story becomes hers alone. It is here where her memories meld with mine and her her own private world becomes the one she lives in today. She opened her eyes to the most exquisite sunlight…the first that she had ever seen. She breathed in deeply a million scents of the forest, and they were all perfect…the first breath she had ever enjoyed. She leapt to her feet and followed the sound of a river nearby, running carelessly with the wind…the first steps she had ever taken.

She knew that there had been something before this…she understood that it had been black, and her entire body tingled with a residual burning that had once been her envy of those who lived in the light. But her world was an explosion of color around her now that envy could no longer touch. She passed lightly over the unfamiliar terrain, relishing in the faint flicker of every leaf in the breeze and the cherishing the music that she understood had been carried over from her life before this light…it seemed to play unceasingly, molding its rhythms to every movement around her.

She was following a dragonfly, fascinated by the sound of its jeweled wings when the breeze brought the scent of the town to her lips. There was no other thought. Her throat was on fire suddenly, and she rushed to sooth the ache.

The entire town would have been drained by nightfall if her sight had not been suddenly invaded by the breathless vision of blood red eyes and honey blond hair that was somehow there and not there at the same time. Alice's breath stopped as she took in the lean, muscular frame of this solemn stranger who had invaded her sight so mysteriously. He was the most beautiful person she had ever laid eyes upon…the _only_ person she had ever laid eyes upon, and she felt completely and unnatural drawn to him.

Alice's eyes took in his surroundings…the cold, grey rain…tables, chairs, silver stools. She knew that it was some sort of meeting place in the north, though she did not yet know what a diner was or which way was north. She had to find this place…this person, and ease the suffering that was so apparent in his elegantly pale features

Her instinct burned for the scent that drifted in the wind, but her entire body burned to be near the man in this strange vision. Her breath began again as his image faded, bringing the scorching desire back into her throat. She hesitated for a moment, hovering and looking with faint longing towards the tiny doomed town...and then she turned her back on temptation.

The blood could wait. It only burned. The flame in his crimson eyes consumed her entirely."


	8. The Prodigal Son

_There is a strange peace as we watch her glide unaffected across the room. A lifetime of captivity cannot hold her as it holds us to the sins that our existence entails. The darkness of her life cannot conceal the color that defines her immortality. She continues unscathed, and he observes her from his position of comfort with his own form of envy because he understands that in my mind she is only the desire for another reality while he is the pursuit of one…a greater sin, and a lower level in Dante's well-designed plan. _

_He looks upon his tiny sister always with a secret apology stained into his expression, remembering another face in another time when his strength was only blood and bone, and not enough to save a life…when the pursuit of power became a fixation to overcome even the strongest of bonds. _

_But his regret cannot repress the grin that permanently lights his face, and that easy smile becomes his permission as his eyes flicker genially from one pale face to the next, finally resting on mine. His musical laughter fills the room with a natural confidence that could only come from him, and within it, there is an endless understanding. My face breaks reluctantly into a smile as well, hidden quickly as I scrutinize my first immortal Brother, who listened to my morbid confessions and told me his in turn as the pain ate slowly away at his life. _

_His position of nonchalance is meant to give the impression of apathy, but his eyes are bright with the challenge he has laid before me…giving words to his greatest mistake…the portrayal of a sin that he has long since overcome. He is the definition of inexplicable excess…the largest of us all, and the strongest, with a competition so far ingrained that it has become instinct. His entire existence is a quest for more…more strength, more pleasure, more freedom, more beauty…but never again shall it be at the expense of those he loves. _

_He reaches out in earnest…takes the hand of his beautiful savior as she passes…pulls her to him passionately. She melts again into willing arms, and he contemplates perfection in her golden eyes. His memories are filled with the pursuit of that perfection, with the unending quest for power, money…lust, and now he desires nothing of the life before her eyes and the kinship that he discovered within a coven of murderers. _

_We all understand the greed that becomes instinct when mixed with a craving for blood, but none have suffered more for human greed than he has. We have all fallen victim to the pursuit of material possessions in our human lives, but none have taken it as far as him--to the point of sacrifice. The cross that he carries is permanent and heavy, and yet he bears the load as he was raised, without complaint. _

_His eyes flash from Brother to Brother, and the bond between us is tangible…frighteningly strong…a strength based in immortality, more powerful than comprehension allows. We understand the secret pain that he will never show the world and it becomes an unbreakable affinity that binds us together in eternity. _

_He passes each of us a playful grin and gazes anxiously at me with an expectant shrug of his shoulders. If impatience were a deadly sin, he would have passed straight into Hell long ago. His eager smile becomes the smile of his lover as he comments on my endless analysis of everything. His nervous laughter becomes the laughter of those around him—great, cheerful bursts to calm us all. _

_I watch the tranquility of that laughter blossom across each face, finally savoring the light that it brings to the eyes of my curious bride, and I am eternally grateful to my bear-like brother, who has always had the power to bring out her carefree smile. My eyes roam from her expression to his, cherishing both beaming faces. They share a sinister similarity that few know of...a dangerous underestimation of the power of instinct and an inability to leave behind the family that they had when they were turned. _

_My smile disappears as I contemplate the impossibly different outcome of both, and my Brother's tale takes center stage…_


	9. Greed 1

His life was lived in shades of green and shards of black, accompanied always by a fresh, quiet aroma that he has never been able to place, and will never be able to erase from his memory. It was the wind in the fields after a long, hard day of work. It was the breeze over the river that lay just beyond his home in backwoods Tennessee. It was the dew in the moonlight that clung to each needle of each primordial pine, and it was the rain that found its way into the caves in slivered streams to wash away the blood in the darkness.

Emmett was the strongest of six siblings, nearly all of them from different mothers, as life in the country was never easy for women of childbearing age. He had never known his mother, nor had he truly known any human that had been worthy of the title. His life had always been gloriously free—in his father's opinion—of any unnecessary feminine influence. There was no room for weakness or sympathy in his arduous routine.

The workload never ceased for the five young brothers. From the time they were old enough to walk, they had been employed in the grueling, mundane tasks of farming life. When their work had been completed in the fields, there was a forest full of trees to level that stretched to Pennsylvania. There were animals to be tended to and others to be hunted—and of course there was the constant competition for their father's favor. It burned in all of them and drove them apart. In this, Emmett came out, more often then not, the winner. He lived for any challenge offered him. He had been raised to strive for the best…to reach for something more at all times.

But there was one thing more that he lived for…his sixth sibling, and his only sister. She was born ten years after him, and exactly eight minutes before the death of her mother. She instantly became the last feminine presence in the McCarthy home, and the thorn in their father's existence. She was a burden from birth to the younger brothers charged with her care, and not worth a second glance to the older ones. To Emmett, she was his only weakness and the only true happiness in his monotonous world from the first time he saw her peaceful face.

When she was old enough to keep up with him, she would follow him relentlessly through the fields and over the mountains, into the most dangerous terrain without a doubt in the world, and he would lift her over root and rock, until she grew tall enough to leap over them without help. She would assist him when she could, and when the task at hand proved too difficult, she would sit beside him as he worked and paint his world with her beautifully vivid tales.

She was a born storyteller. None of the siblings had been allowed any formal schooling. Their father considered such things as books and numbers a waste of time, and he deplored anything that required imagination. Her talent was considered worthless, and so her tales were spun well out of his earshot.

They were folkloric and mythical, centered around a carefree hero that she had affectionately christened Jonas. The tales would weave and twist into one another and he would find himself suddenly lost in his sister's well-constructed fiction, wishing for the legendary strength and freedom that she had bestowed upon her character. The pieces that he enjoyed the most were the traits that he had always associated with her. They bled into the story through her character--a contagious joy or an inexplicable goodness--things inside her that illuminated his days and made them distinguishable.

Emmett pushed himself to the limit every minute to please his father. He grew taller and stronger each exhausting day to bear the strain. He found himself often unable to find his own smile and unable to even remember what it felt like to laugh. In those times, Emmett would think silently of the friendly giant that his sister had created, and wish for his fairy-tale life.

It was his sister's deep, peaceful breathing that he woke to every morning. It was only her inexplicable laughter that could cheer him during the day. It was her whispered stories that he fell asleep to each night, and it was her sobbing screams that announced the death of their father one solemn, misty morning just before the frosts came. She had awoken unusually early—with the sun, which was rare for her. She found her father cold and dead in his bed. He had died in the night. Of what, no one would know. He was an old man, and they passed quickly in those times.

It all fell apart after that.

Emmett's father had been cruel at times...a slave driver to five sons, an uneducated tyrant to his only daughter, and utterly Machiavellian to the neighbors whose lands he bought out from under them without the slightest remorse, but he had always kept order among his sons. With order came production. With production came money. With money came land. With land came power, and power was all that mattered. The philosophy seemed so simple.

In the end, all of the power in the world could not stop his lands from being torn apart by the greed of five brothers. Emmett had always been the fiercest fighter, and the most favored among the sons, and so he maintained the greatest portion. His brothers seethed in secrecy from their tiny plots on the outskirts of what once had been their father's empire.

And suddenly Emmett was faced with a freedom that he had never believed imaginable. For as long as he had remembered, his days had been filled with endless, exhausting labor, and his nights with a dreamless delirium. It had been an unbreakable routine and an eternal struggle to be stronger…richer…greater, than everyone else around him, created by a man who could no longer make demands. He was seventeen years old and without orders for the first time in his life. Freedom was unfathomable.

He found himself spending more and more time away from his farm. It only reminded him of a responsibility that he had never wanted. He immersed himself in the nightlife of the mining towns that had sprung up all around, discovering the pleasures of alcohol and nightly combat. He enjoyed betting on his own strength, and he rarely lost.

Emmett's sister had fallen under his charge. She stayed at home when he wandered off for days and she worried more than any seven year old every should when he came home bloodied and bruised, and often too drunk to do more than stumble to his bed. He had lost interest in her tales of nobility and felicity, and he had all but forgotten Jonas, and even his creator in his quest to find his own piece of power. He seemed to believe that power could be achieved with a fist much quicker than with a plow.

By the time he came to his senses, it was nearly too late. He awoke one morning nearly two years later in the street of a town that he did not remember traveling to with his body bruised, his money gone, and his head screaming from the alcohol that had caused him to lose his first fight the night before. His muscles ached, but his mind was suddenly quite clear. He could not go on like this.

Emmett was only weeks away from losing his lands to the brothers that he had fought off in the beginning. They had been observing with growing anticipation as their strongest brother slowly squandered his father's inheritance, and now they were writhing in pleasure in their homes on the borders, waiting in the wings with their father's money to buy back his land as soon as it went on the auction block. Their father would have been proud.

Suddenly awakened to his harsh reality, and unwilling to allow his young sister to be forced to live as a slave again in the household of one of her other brothers, Emmett threw himself into rectifying his mistakes and saving what his reckless abandonment had put in jeopardy. He threw himself back into his work with a feverish determination. He spent his days salvaging what he could of the fields, and his nights in the forests, cutting timber and hunting. His sister followed him faithfully, overjoyed that he had finally come back to her. She sold the firewood and hides during the day as he worked failing fields, and she accompanied him each night further and further into the forests to find the next day's product.

It was a lost cause, and he knew it almost from the beginning. Nothing short of a miracle would save their lands from foreclosure, but Emmett persisted, fighting the exhaustion and the hopelessness by losing himself in his sister's stories once again. She had new plots now, and new characters from two years of near solitude, but her hero never changed. Jonas was always there to save the day…always there to take away the bleakness of his own days. Emmett pushed through, imagining himself as Jonas—saving his lands and finding his freedom in his family and not in a fight or a bottle. It all seemed so obvious in hindsight, with his body aching, his mind reeling, and his sister's forgiveness tinting her tales. It all seemed written in stone now. He should have become the carefree character that she loved so much. He should have been her hero. This illusion played over in his head night after night as they plunged deeper into the forests, out of their own land, and into their neighbors'.

It was this illusion that was playing in his mind when he stumbled upon the tiny black opening in the wall of stone that they had been following. They had been walking for some time, Emmett with a bundle of firewood burdening his stride and his sister with a string of small animals from the traps placed secretly on his brother's land.

He approached the entrance cautiously, letting the firewood fall behind him. Already, he noted the gamey scent that emanated from within and indicated the presence of a predator. He held his rifle at the ready, motioning for his sister to stay far back. She obeyed with unease. Slowly, very cautiously, Emmett entered into the crack. Only a fraction of sunlight shone into the small opening, but what he could make out directly in front of him caused his legs to give out. He fell to his knees. A cursed escaped his lips, loud enough to send his sister running for him.

The air was thick with the scent of some wild animal, but there was nothing to indicate that the animal still claimed the cave as its den. Still, he kept his rifle near as he crawled to the back of the cave, unable to regain his footing. It was speckled with the most beautiful color that he had seen in his twenty years of life—a radiant, reflective gold. Unable to believe it, he pulled out his hatchet and pushed it into an exposed vein of the strange metal. It gave in slightly to the blade. Emmett's heart leapt. He heard his sister's breath stop behind him. Gold. They'd found gold on his brother's land.

There was a muffled thump as his sister fainted.


	10. Greed 2

They spent the next three nights from sundown to sun up in the cave, filling bags and buckets, and anything that they could find with the beautiful malleable miracle that would transform their illusions into reality. What they were doing was outright theft, but the lure of the precious metal was strong, and it was only his brother, after all. He would have done the same to Emmett had the tables been turned. His sister did not protest. She knew the sacrifices that Emmett had been making to keep his lands, and even at ten years old, she understood what would happen to her when he lost them in spite of his efforts.

The gold sang to him of lands saved, and lives lived far away from this place…luxuries that he had only dreamed of and a life that his sister deserved. He kept these strange conversations to himself, fearing that his sister would find something wrong in them.

On the third night, they broke through to another chamber. It was only the smallest of holes, and as he peered into it he was affronted by the stronger scent of wild animal. He gave the rifle to his sister and began to pound away at the rock, watching as the hole slowly began to enlarge. She protested—she was frightened of wolves and bears and mountain lions—but her objections were easily silenced by the pounding of the pickax against the stone. When the sun began to rise, Emmett was forced to give up until the next night. His brother was sure to hear if he continued through the day.

His sister protested the entire journey to the cave the following evening, insisting that they had enough to save the farm and begging him not to quarry further. He would not listen to her. The feeble protests of a ten year old girl were no match for the subtle persuasion of gold. He gave her the rifle again without even the courtesy of a reply, reminding himself of all of the wonderful things that he could buy her when winter came. She held the gun, angry and unsteady, on the tiny hole as he chipped away tiny slivers.

By midnight, Emmett realized with chagrin that the stone would not give further. He had worn the head of the pick ax more than he had opened the hole that night. Frustrated and sweating, he relieved his sister of the rifle and sat down in what had become the antechamber to a section that he would never see. He imagined walls of pure gold. His mind elaborated, adding a sprinkling of diamonds that he would never touch as well. He sighed.

It was then that his sister finally found something that she could do that her perfect big brother could not. Her smile was illuminated by the lantern light as she grabbed it and slipped wordlessly into the hole, leaving Emmett slack-jawed on the cavern floor. He didn't have time to protest as he watched her disappear--she was too fast. After a moment, he tried to leap in after her, but could only fit halfway through. His anger rose as he followed the lantern light with perplexed eyes.

And quickly disappeared.

There were rivers of it…beautifully intertwined veins of the same metal glistening from the walls as the light from the lantern fell upon them. It was indescribable.

And then the light fell on two enormous reflective eyes.

There was a moment when Emmett understood the danger that his fragile, innocent sister did not, and he cried out just before something large and black moved forward to knock the lantern from her hand. It fell to the ground but did not go out. He focused on the play of shadows in the lamplight as he listened to his sister's bloodcurdling scream mix with the unmistakable grunting of an angry bear. His shouts matched hers as he pushed himself desperately into the hole.

His shoulders were sliced open. He felt a sickening pop as something dislocated itself, and still his sister's shrieking continued. She was crying his name in the darkness, but he could not see her. He screamed back for her, looking desperately in all directions, but he could see nothing more than the detached yellow light from the lantern as something just beyond the line of light made the flame flicker. Then the screaming rose to an impossibly high note for only a moment, and stopped abruptly with a sick, echoing crunch. The bear gave a triumphant roar, and his sister's body fell ungracefully into the lantern light. He could only see one mangled arm, leading terrifyingly to a small, thin shoulder, distorted and twisted at an odd angle.

He went into a fit of rage then that he barely remembers, screaming and thrashing…pushing himself further into the hole. He was unable to feel the pain as his shoulder popped again, but his poor, breakable baby sister remained painfully out of reach.

He pulled himself out and went for the pick ax. For nearly two hours, he screamed and hammered relentlessly on ungiving stone, finally stopping when his shoulder injury made movement impossible. He looked in again. She was there. Her arm had not moved, but the blood pooling around it had spread slowly toward the far wall. Blood and gold.

His mind filled completely with fury. He could focus on nothing else but his desire to find the animal that had done this to his sister—that had taken away the one happiness in his world. He tore from the cave, and over the small hill, knowing that the bear had to come from somewhere near, unable to rationalize at this point that the bears exit would also grant him access to his dead sister. He was halfway over the tiny cliff when he heard an angry roar from directly behind him. He swore. The bear had come for him in the other side of the cave. Emmett turned without thought to face his sister's killer.

He has no real memories of the bear. The attack was so quick…so violent that he only remembers one enormous paw as it knocked him to the ground, and a faint glimpse of a bloodstained muzzle as it clamped down on his jugular. His last memory of the bear is the random thought that the blood on its muzzle was his sister's lifeblood. His head blazed with anger once more before everything went black.

He remembers the most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his life then, outlined in the purest light and staring at him with such an odd expression. He wondered how something so beautiful—so holy—could seem so tortured. And then he was flying, and she was there flying with him. He thought he must be in the arms of an angel, and he looked around for his sister, but she was not there. The horror of what had just occurred overtook him then, and he cried out, passing into darkness once again.

He thought the fire he felt inside him when he woke was simply his sentence in Hell. His greed had caused an innocent death, and he would spend eternity burning because of it. It only seemed fair. He waited as it consumed him and thought of that last high-pitched scream and his sister's arm torn to shreds, and he wished for a pain greater than the one that he was in. Rosalie had suffered too much in bringing him. She did not trust herself to let him live, and so I listened to Emmett's thoughts and confessed to him what he was becoming. I told him my theory as the truth began to take hold of him—gave him his own Deadly Sin, and he took it in stride with a resigned self loathing that I understood completely. I liked him immediately.

The pain faded quickly for him.

I foresaw the problem immediately, but I could do nothing to avoid it. He was the strongest vampire that I had ever seen, and he would have ripped me apart in that moment if I had tried to stop him.

Emmett's body had been transformed, but his mind continued focused on one thing alone. He wanted his revenge upon the bear that had taken his sister's life, and he was out of my sight before his thoughts even registered in my mind. It took him only a moment to understand where he was, though we were over a hundred miles from his home. His senses were impossibly advanced now. He had listened as I had explained his increased strength, and he understood that the man eater would be no match for him now that he was no longer a man.

It took him less than a quarter of an hour to reach the cave again, destroying everything in his path. The bear had returned. He could heart its slow heartbeat—smell its blood from miles away. It was a wonderfully sweet scent. It was the same scent that he associates now with wind, and dew—and something much more tempting. His throat burned with the desire to feast. It was the strongest desire he had ever felt in his life. It overpowered his need for revenge. He rushed toward the cave entrance.

The hole that he had made was still there. An image flashed in Emmett's mind of his sister, so small and frail, staring at the entrance with a gun in her hand as he hacked away at it. The rifle was still on the cavern floor. He pushed the memory away with as much disgust as he pushed the rifle away. He had no use for it now. Her killer was feet away, waiting to be slaughtered.

The rock was no match for him now. The scent of the blood on the other side was so utterly enticing. It was difficult to control his strength as he passed through it easilyt. And there, just inches away was the source of his pain…the source of his hatred…the cause of his desire. The smell of it surged into every immortal pore. He flew toward the scent in the darkness…

Her eyes fluttered open as he snatched her up. She didn't struggle. She didn't fight as his teeth sunk into her neck. She had been fighting for three long days—struggling to stay alive in agony until her brother could get to her. He would save her—take away all of the pain and they would be happy. He would see then that all of her stories had always been about him. He had always been her Jonas—her hero.

He couldn't know what she was thinking as he drained her of every last drop of her life's blood. He was a newborn, under the influence of a power greater than even his own impressive strength, but he will never forget her last word, spoken as a statement as if she had known in her heart that her stories had always been real…

"Jonas…"

Time stopped.

It was not a predator in Emmett's hands. The warm corpse he held was nowhere near the size of a bear. It had not been a roar that he had just heard through the rush in his ears…

He looked down at the tiny victim in his hands.

And his scream echoed through the entire forest. The cave collapsed, crushing the delicate body of his sister…crushing his sanity, but leaving his immortal body unscathed. The revelation of what he had just done washed over him like a tidal wave, taking him away, threatening to leave him with nothing more than a hollowed shell…

And then his angel was at his side, and she was talking to him…soothing him. She had followed him at my warning, of course, but she had not arrived in time. I had followed both of them and so I was there to watch and agaonize as his sanity wavered from one reality to the next, betrayed by his instincts and the new senses that overcame everything.

His sister was dead, but somehow his new eyes could only focus on those beautiful eyes that promised to take him away from all of this.

Not by a bear, but by his own hands, and he could no longer even follow her into the dark.

The touch of her skin was an impossible distraction, like silk over the wounds in his sanity.

He could no longer do anything to save his delicate sister from her tomb of crumbled gold. It was his sentence to live with her death on his conscience for eternity.

The scent of his angel called to him, blocking out the lingering scent of the blood that he had just shed mercilessly—promising to lead him away from this life and into a new one.

Emmett's mind snapped.

And he realized with disdain that he had come to an impossible crossroads. Either his life or his sanity had to end in this solemn place. He could give in to the madness so easily—live the centuries promised to him now in a fit of guilt and rage. That path called to him now more than any other, but he knew that there was no redemption at its end. He was damned no matter which direction he chose.

Or he could chose the quiet path…the path where is sister would be made immortal in her own right. He could give life to the character that she had put so much of her soul into. He could fill the world with the strength and happiness that his sister had so often brought to him.

He looked into the beautiful golden eyes of his angel, and chose the other path.

He became Jonas...


	11. Among the Shattered

**Warning: You've read the books. You know how Rosalie is turned. The sin I've chosen for her is lust, so you can imagine what it will be about. I've tried to keep it relatively tasteful, but for some of you who **_**truly**_** understand what happened to her, this may trigger…**

_The laughter has faded from his face…from all the air around him. He dies again, and clings to the one who brought him out of the night in the beginning. She tenses as he wraps himself around her and her eyes become cold an expectant. His sins hang heavy in the air around them, and hers are buried deep still, waiting to be unearthed. She glares at me from the shelter of his arms._

_I stare at her face for a long time, picking her thoughts from her troubled mind. Her story is the most difficult to tell, this beauty queen that followed me third into the dark. She is the epitome of sensuality…the erotic hidden within the mundane. The wild desire in every heart and every mind she encounters. I call her Sister. My eyes are blind to her in every other way._

_Her eyes grant the permission that her heart denies so fiercely and her story is mine to relive. I brace myself for the pain. She curls closer to her lover, my Brother, and she is lost for a moment in his understanding embrace. Her passion fills the room, and fills his eyes with only her. This is a past he knows and one she bears because she must. She's lost the ability to dream, and finally, she lives among the shattered. An eternity of wishing for another life…gone. And now she cannot see the use of holding something close._

_Her desire for him burns those around her as her memories burn into my mind…Such a precious contradiction, the pain of mortal innocence and the pleasure of immortal mystery. She had kept that innocence in a porcelain heart, and pulled it out when she needed it—innocence that was sacrificed to the impulse of another…purity that was taken for the sake of pride. _

_She watches me from beneath her lover's lips…observes the pain of her death on the face of another…her brother. She allows the humiliation to blossom in my expression. Her arms, her lips, her body have gone to another place, but her eyes remain fixed icily on mine. I see it once again. I understand it once again. They stole from her an eternity of sleep, but nothing could keep away the nightmares…of struggling…of crying…of pleading for an end that would never come, and trying to escape their weight._

_They held her down and stole the heart she hid inside. They introduced her to the darkness, and now she will never fully understand the light. They initiated the pain that stole away all of her emotion. They pushed themselves violently into every memory that she held dear and took them all by force. _

_I hold her gaze as she folds further into my Brother's arms. The passion she feels for him keeps the pain from burning her alive, but they're all still inside her head at times...Still holding her there, frozen in the moment…Still whispering that it only hurts once. She knows that everything is a lie, because the pain is still there. When her lover is not with her to turn the pain into pleasure…when she is alone in those quiet moments and they violate her mind, and those broken human memories dominate, it will always hurt._

_They are stronger than she thought. Strong enough to hurt her still in all of her immortal glory. Strong enough to make their laughter heard from the shallow graves she left them in._

_She clings to her lover…to everything that he has become for her. She holds tight to every second of the love and desire that he awakens within her, remembering a time before the light when she could not feel. She's lost the ability to dream. She's lost the control that she had so completely relied upon. She's lost the reality that was falling down around her anyway. But finally, she lives among the shattered. And it will never go away._

_I look at the beautiful woman in my arms who is waiting to hear the tale of the one who stood by her side through the birth of our child. She is the wild desire of all my eternity…the mother of my child and the possessor of whatever part of my soul that remains. I remember the thoughts of the men who would have done the same to her…sickened, hurting, filled with the thoughts of rapists and murderers, I begin my Sister's tale: _

**Up Next: Lust**


	12. Lust 1

**Sorry this took so long. The beginning of the school year usually means more time spent on forced writing, and less on pleasure writing...same goes for reading I suppose :(**

"Her inevitable death had always been hiding under a thin blue blanket in the smallest room of our clean white Victorian home on the outskirts of Rochester. She had always known it deep inside. She had felt its pull from every corner of her altered reality. That was probably why she never allowed herself to go any nearer to our house than the opposite side of the street.

She was the object of every man in the tiny town's most poignant fantasy…the perfectly proportioned pin-up doll who hid under the guise of an innocent school girl. If she had been possessed of my talents in that particular period, I am convinced that she would not have been able to walk down the street one day without blushing. It was this knowledge that tainted her thoughts from the very beginning. Her beauty developed so rapidly and so completely that her mind did not even react to the vanity and arrogance that accompanied it.

It was all she had—that beauty. What did she need with years of schooling, or a prosperous career when any door she'd ever desired had always been opened for her by obliging, glassy-eyed men bearing gifts?  
She played with them…flirted shamelessly, and toyed with emotions that she was too innocent to understand. I can't imagine the amount of hearts she broke. She counted them with pride, thinking that her power lay somewhere within that number…the power to control any man she wanted.

Humans have always been naturally uncomfortable around us. It's something that is learned and taken in stride without much regret. But she was uncomfortable around the three of us for a different reason. We were so flawlessly beautiful…the only ones in a sea of faces that outshined her. We crushed her concept of control with one tiny flippant glance in anyone's direction. What was worse for her was that Carlisle and I seemed to be the only ones immune to her seduction. Our inexplicable indifference created a tear in the fabric of her reality and let in things that frightened her—things with complicated undertones, like insecurity, doubt, and self loathing…things she was simply too naïve to recognize.

But we existed in an entirely different world. The world for Rosalie was a beautiful, happy, bubbling place that revolved around only her. Beyond her magnificent exterior, she truly _was_ unbelievably naïve. Her universe at the time was centered around only one thing—the prestigious Royce King. He was the key to all of her dreams and ambitions. He was the prince to occupy her private ivory tower. He was the future father of her beautiful bright-eyed, dark haired children. He was her entire existence and everything else was simply a means to an end.

It's frightening how powerful illusion can become…how much of an influence it can have in a life less ordinary. Every piece of her soul was tied to illusion that night as she left her best friend Vera's fantasies at her doorstep and took up her own once more. Her mind was absorbed in weddings and weather and happily-ever-afters. Her breath came in blissful half laughs as she imagined her infinitely bright forever.

_His_ breath, so chilled by hate, and lust, and alcohol changed something inside her almost at once.

Her entire universe shattered around her, showering to the ground with the brass buttons of her jacket and finally mixing with her blood as they took it in turn to hit her…kick her…push her…destroy her. The images she has haven't faded…not in the slightest in over 75 years. They still burn and claw inside her head just as they are inside mine now.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine that she was somewhere else…tried to bring back the power of her innocent fantasies, but the pain was too sharp…too purifying. It held her there unable to move or breathe, or even cry, and it opened her eyes finally to a new world of hate and humiliation.

When it was over—when their malevolent laughter was no longer ringing in her ears—she lay in the street completely incapacitated, not by the monsters who had left her broken and ravished, but by the horrific new reality that they had forced her to see. She lay numb from the cold, and watched immobile as that beautiful, vain, defiant, free-spirited, innocent girl that she had been only minutes before began to convulse in front of her fading eyes.

That shadow of that girl died there inside of her. It was so devastating that even viewing her memories years later causes a small death within me. In many ways, she was already dead before Carlisle could even catch the scent of her blood. Her soul was already cold when he lifted her into his arms.

My protests to Carlisle on her turning were not based on my impression of the human Rosalie Hale. They were based on her thoughts when I entered that night and found her already in the grip of undeath. It was written in blood across her broken body and burned into her entire existence. She had given up…her heart simply hadn't noticed yet.

What horrible penance were we creating by sentencing this poor child to an eternity of reliving their crime again and again?

Over the years, the humanity of those who are not human tends to fade. It takes very little time for some…longer for others, but by the time the venom had burned itself into her veins, whatever humanity that Rosalie had possessed had disappeared entirely. Her eyes were cold, and dead, and utterly emotionless when she finally opened them to her new reality—the eyes of someone who had gone much too far down the path toward Hell before being dragged back.

Looking into those eyes, we were all suddenly certain that the once peaceful town of Rochester would not survive Carlisle's hasty mistake. Hearing her first furiously bewildered thoughts as an immortal, I was certain that the deaths would rival those of an epidemic.

But she surprised us all.

Her mind was operating only on pure instinct…not on the highly attuned, barely controlled instincts of a vampire, but on that of a survivor of an unimaginably brutal rape and murder. Random images and memories of her pain flashed ruthlessly through her head. I saw them all…felt them all, and the force of them hit me like a train, knocking me to the floor. It was the first pain I'd felt in years.

She turned first on me, understanding vaguely that her humiliation could be used as a weapon against me. Her mind sped to darker things…parts of her human memory that had her screaming for death, and the agony that she saw in my eyes as I writhed away from her gave her pleasure. Her emotions were out of control. The confusion of death…the mortification of the crimes committed against her…the pain of the injuries she had sustained…the venom coursing through her new body…the strange overpowering desire for blood. It all mixed into a vicious blur that shielded her completely from rational thought.

Her thoughts at that moment resembled those of the immortal children. Carlisle and Esme were shocked into immobility. She moved away from us unhindered, pausing only when she caught her reflection in a hall mirror. Until then, she had been convinced that the irreparable damage the men had done to her body and—worse—to her beautiful face would be her curse to bear for all of eternity, but she was distracted completely by her own splendor as she realized the all encompassing power of her own immortality.

The power blended neatly into her emotional disarray, twisting it all into an inexplicable craving…the desire to stare at the magnificence in front of her forever…to be human and carefree once again…to escape the pain of the memories that assaulted her incessantly. The lust to be near someone, as she had imagined being near to her dear Royce nearly every night…the lust to drink his blood, and to listen with satisfaction as his screams filled the room…as his life's blood flowed warm between her lips and into her own exquisitely powerful body…

_No!_

It was both the intoxicating manner in which the bloodlust dominated her once human fantasies, and the utter disgust that coursed through her at the mere notion of having her murderer inside her once again that broke the short spell the mirror had cast. With a strangled moan, she escaped into the night. I understood more than she did her intentions as she disappeared, but the images still played sickeningly over and over in my head as much as in hers.

She had become the substance of nightmares, and the men who had introduced her to the darkness would soon understand the true essence of the Hell they had created for themselves. They deserved everything that was coming for them.

I watched her go with a secret longing of my own, wishing her happy hunting.

**A/N: Up next: More Lust (You didn't think I would avoid the luscious possibility of describing the torture scenes, did you? If I'm going to be labled sick, then I'm going all out to earn it! Besides, they really deserve it.) **


	13. Lust 2

**Warning: There are flashbacks in this section...if you read the last chapter, you know of what...consider this your trigger warning!**

She had suffered for three long days. The human Rosalie Hale had been missing for that long as well, and the five _true_ monsters that inhabited the town of Rochester had used the time to mercilessly cover up anything that would ever lead to an accusing finger pointed at them. There was no regret…no sense of loss at the death of something so beautiful and innocent…there was only a frighteningly frigid sense of self preservation as they went about their day as usual, casually collecting alibis.

It was an enormous jolt to the entire community when two of Rochester's most prominent young men were found dead—clearly murdered in the back room of the church parsonage where they had been preparing for a play that would put an end to a week-long revival. The preacher claimed that both boys had been incredibly helpful from the first day, and he was quick to draw connections—not the correct ones—between the death of the two young men and the disappearance of one of the most stunning young women in the town. Evil, he claimed, had finally found its way north.

Indeed it had.

Evil, in fact, had followed the scent that the two men had left tangled in her hair and soiled into her clothing. She had followed them to the church…to their perfect alibi, and had observed them from a second story window as they began to prepare themselves for the presentation. She watched with the attentiveness that immortality had recently granted her, but she only saw them in random dark flashes. Her mind was still frozen in a churning, boiling mess of memory. She was seeing the world in slices of reality and pieces of insanity.

She saw the tall blond man laughing jovially with his friend through the glass…saw that same laughing face as he held her down for his friends. He threw a playful punch at his dark haired counterpart, and she saw him throwing the punch that had broken her nose…so he had been the one to do that! She growled under her breath.

The dark haired man glared harmlessly at him…the same glare that had been so hateful as she lay helpless below him, crying for him to stop. She watched through the glass as he removed his shirt…_she cried as he pulled open her blouse_…the blond one reached for a costume…_he reached out to grab her hair and slam her head into the ground_…they turned to go, laughing casually at their costumes…_they moved aside as they passed her on to their next friend, breathing in heavy drunken bursts…_

There was a sudden cloud of shattered glass, and she was in the room before her mind made the conscious decision to move. The dark haired man didn't even have a chance to turn before his legs were shattered. She took great care not to break the skin. His screams echoed down the halls, but they fell on dead ears…quite literally. The parsonage was empty—the people had gathered in the church to see the play.

Her mind took her back to his dark brown eyes as they surveyed her broken body with a sick desire. He had taken her in his arms—just as _she_ took him in hers at that moment—and had passed her to the next eager man. She cried out with the pain of the memory and dropped him over the back of the only chair in the room. There was a sickening crunch as his spine snapped and his cries stopped suddenly. The pain disappeared from her undead face, and froze forever onto his.

The blond haired man took one look at her frightening beauty…her confused blood red eyes, and he broke into sobs. The tears that she had cried as she had tried to pull away from his awkward weight flashed before her eyes. His hand had come out of nowhere, smashing her nose, filling her mouth with blood. There was no malevolence in her mind as she reached out for him…only a blind confusion as the past mixed with the present. She reached out to stop him in the past, and her hand made contact with his face in the present. Suddenly, he was screaming. _She_ had broken _his_ nose.

The scent of the blood that was beginning somewhere inside his head was quickly becoming maddening. She wouldn't have it…couldn't bare the thought of any part of them inside her ever again. She grabbed him and pinched his nose shut, closing his mouth with her other hand and pulling him to the floor, preventing the spill of his blood. She could smell it as it flowed down into his lungs. She could taste it on her tongue, but her mind was once again in the past, choking and sputtering…sobbing and trying desperately not to strangle as her own blood poured down her own throat. She smiled as the convulsions began under her pale hands. The smile became wider when the convulsions stopped.

And then Evil found its way home.

She appeared in the morning, her eyes still dead and her thoughts still radiating a pain that would not allow me near her. She returned to the room where she had been turned and did not speak or move again for three days…until the two boys had gone into the ground and a third had begun his journey back to Atlanta. We had allowed this. She was not killing innocents, and she was entitled to her justice, but it was with mild preoccupation that we grouped together to confront her on the third day. I braced myself for the barrage of memory that would most certainly wound me as soon as I came within range.

But she was gone.

She returned the next day with fresh images in her mind…another blond…a radiant smile as he complimented his friend in a melodic southern accent…the same smile as his foot made contact with her ribs and she tried to crawl away…as he whispered in her ear how girls like her made him burn up inside. In her thoughts the smile slowly twisted in terror as his mind struggled to accept the walking corpse before him. It molded into a grimace of pain as he stared out the back window of a beautiful black 1933 Ford Coupe that was slowly becoming engulfed in flames. The smile finally melted away with the rest of his body. He could have easily broken the window and escaped, but in the end, he had chosen the fire over her Hellish crimson gaze. She had taught him that girls like her know exactly what it's like to burn inside.

He had never made it to Atlanta.

The idea of his charred body still smoldering inside his makeshift metal pyre seemed to have the most effect on Carlisle. He confronted her that night…tried to convince her that what she was doing would not change what had already been done, but his compassion and sincerity had no effect. She had returned to the protection of catatonia, and Carlisle retreated to his study to ponder an option that he truly dreaded, and that he had not had to think of for nearly 300 years...the extermination of a vampire. It hurt his still heart even to contemplate the possibility.

She passed another three days in her unmoving, unblinking, silent state…enough time for the news of the "unfortunate automobile accident" to reach the Rochester newspaper, and then she slipped out into the night after the fourth. Her last two attackers had a horrible idea of what was happening, of course, and had made the arrangements necessary to escape the gruesome fate that awaited them. She found the fourth one on the way to her former fiancée's home, where they had planned to meet before their impromptu journey to New York City.

He was Royce's best friend. She knew him well. Memories of poolside reunions with him and his own mildly pretty girlfriend appeared in her mind…carefree times when the world had been full of certainty. She stalked him silently—ruthlessly—just as he had followed behind her in the street, laughing as she had tried to drag herself toward the light of the nearest house. Her breath caught in her throat. It had been him who had stopped her breath that night…him who had wrapped his hands around her throat and caused her world to momentarily disappear.

Only momentarily, though.

She approached him gracefully in the night, seeing only one hand around her throat and one pulling at her skirt…felt the panic as she clawed at his unyielding arms forgetting the pain of everything else he was doing to her, only able to focus on the golden discs that had appeared in her eyesight and ate away at her consciousness. It hadn't stopped him. The past and the present both faded to black then, and when she could see again, she was staring into the bulging horrified eyes of his corpse. She left him hanging in the parlor of the Royce mansion and went looking for the final man…the one who had created the break in her perception of time, and the only one who could end her insanity. Her Royce.

He was not there. The mansion was empty with the morbid exception to the new addition in the parlor. She knew where he had gone. His scent was the strongest in her memory. She was on her way out when a glimpse of delicate white caught her eye and she turned to see the wedding dress that had once been his mother's. An image of his beautiful brown eyes as he took her hand by the seashore and asked him to marry her sent her into a sudden rage. She snatched the dress up from its place on the chair, and stowed it under one arm without thinking.

She was in New York before the sun began to show on the horizon.

He had taken refuge in an old banking building owned, of course, by his father. The guards outside the door were his father's as well. She would have scoffed at the two slight humans in her path if her mind had been focused at all on revenge. It was not. It continued to play the memories of her former life again and again…continued to blend her past and her present into an indecipherable, incomprehensible continuum. There was no revenge in her eyes when she appeared at the entrance of the ancient safe clothed in the gown that she had seen herself in so many thousands of times over the past few months. The two guards fell to the side with their necks cleanly snapped, not out of revenge, but out of pure confusion. Why had her lover…her future…gone to such great lengths to escape her?

An image of golden buttons falling to the ground…a flash of pain as her hair was pulled from her head. She rejected them—pushed them violently out of her mind, and entered the vault.

Her prince was there waiting for her. He screamed when he saw her in all of her pale beauty. His cries brought the reflection of the cries of another to her memory, and for a moment, she was lost—watching him as he pushed a frail blond girl to the ground, ignoring her pleading. Was it possible for a human to be so beautiful even in the grip of death? The memory of the girl's pleading mixed quickly with another type of strangled begging. She heard it as if from a distance. It seemed to fit perfectly with the ghastly snap that turned it into a high-pitched squeal of agony. The screams and the snapping seemed to continue for a very long time.

She looked around for the source, and her eyes fell once again on the beautiful blond girl. Her clothes were torn away, turning the perfect curves of her perfect body into something vulgar and shameful. Blood poured from her face, and her hands were shaking as a man with curly dark hair loomed above her, buttoning his pants…complaining to the other men near him that there was blood on his collar. The girl did not look at him…could no longer turn her shattered head. Instead, her eyes blazed through the barrier of the past and burned through the insanity that had taken her over completely in a later time.

And suddenly everything was perfectly clear.

She had been that girl once—a very long time ago, and the man who had caused her so much pain was in this room with her now. She turned in shock to face him.

The brown eyes that she had once been so in love with stared back at her in a mask of unimaginable fear and pain. He was no longer screaming, though his face served as evidence that he must have done so for a very long time before his heart finally gave out. She stared, frozen and confused at his lifeless corpse, which was twisted and contorted in ways that could only be achieved through the breaking of nearly every bone in his body, and realized with profound horror that she had been responsible. Somehow, though, she could not find a single piece of emotion left to feel for him.

Rosalie was born into immortality as the coldest, most inhumane monster that I have ever encountered in my entire existence. It was never her fault. She had not chosen her path, but chosen or not, that path had led her to a place where the humanity that bound her to the mortal world had ceased to exist. The quality that kept her from taking more human life as she made her way in a panic through the crowded streets of New York was not compassion, but her shear blinding tenacity.

She returned home a completely different person. She dressed herself in the elegance suitable for someone of her beauty. She finally spoke to us, offering her gratitude to Carlisle, and her friendship to myself and Esme. We moved south then, to Appalachia, and she began to settle into the life that had been forced upon her. She became the beauty in our lives, and perhaps Carlisle and Esme were fooled, but her thoughts could never lie. There was no beauty left inside of her.

It would be two long years before she would find the one who would bring the beauty back to her life.

**A/N: Sorry if this was a bit confusing. I was trying to portray the chaos one feels after an attack of such a degree, but it turns out that it's not as easy as I thought to describe chaos...**


	14. Through the Forest

**The title is a reference to the Wood of the Suicides. In _Dante's Inferno_, all of the suicides become trees in a wood on the outskirts of Lower Hell where they are condemned to be stripped of their branches and bleed constantly from the wounds inflicted by losing their leaves.**

* * *

_The pain, the hate, the heat in her eyes that had once been so cold and lifeless…her death rolls over me in waves and fills the room with a contagious hopelessness…something that not even our newest brother can remedy…something that can only be endured by the one we all call Mother. She smiles and opens her arms to her child who shies away from the contact of others, but falls like an infant into the patient protection so willingly offered. It is she who comforts when even the inability to sleep cannot keep the darkness at bay, just as it is she who suffers when we find ourselves embracing that darkness and becoming the nightmares._

_She runs her fingers silently over trembling pale arms and golden hair, whispering lullabies that call to mind the pieces of her soul that she has sacrificed to replace the shards once missing within us all. There is a song in her heart for each of us. The one she whispers now makes the world disappear…gives words to sweet forgetfulness for her child who learned humanity again as a predator of men. The lyrics are familiar to her because it is the song that she sang as she stood on the edge contemplating her own form of oblivion so long ago._

_Her daughter smiles under her loving hands, and everything is right again. She moves her eyes to mine—her second son--and appraises me with calm concern. Four deaths relived and three yet to shoulder…too much for any of her children to have to bear, and yet her entire body tenses in preparation. She knows her tale is next…the tale of her first son and the time in her life when she could not find the light. The lullaby she has reserved for me dances on her lips, revealing the conflict between pain and permission that rages behind her tranquil expression. It is the song that she sang to her first son in the small hours of the night when she could still sleep and he would not._

_She accepts the hand of my Father on her shoulder offered to her in compassion and a love so deep that no one could even begin to understand. She has become the sunlight in his world of eternal storms and the meaning underlying his very existence….the silent hope behind every moment lived for her six immortal children, and at times the only reason left to hold on to humanity. She has become our definition of unconditional love and unbreakable hope._

_Her eyes close as she listens to the quiet murmur of her children all around her and the steadily beating heart of her granddaughter. There is nothing in her manner that would hint at the impenetrable shadow of despair that defined her human life…nothing that would lead one to imagine her last minutes at the edge of a cliff with only escape from the pain of her memories in her head. _

_And yet the shadows are always there, behind every touch and every loving gesture…behind every quiet word of advice and encouragement that she provides. They make every caress more important because she understands the sacrifices made to achieve such a moment. They make every second of every day of eternity more exquisite because she understands that even in immortality there is an end to all things…even the lives of those she holds most dear. She accepts this, and somewhere in this horrifying possibility, life becomes the most precious of all things and a love beyond all comprehension takes hold._

_But before the indescribable devotion of our father, there was a mortal husband, who stole from her a life lived passionately and left her only with fear. Before her six undying children, there was one son, frail and mortal, who left this world young and took with him his mother's desire to live. Before there were ancient houses to restore, secret islands to populate, and endless possibilities, there was only a beautiful cliff and the inescapable pull of the water so far below. _

_Before there was hope, there was blinding desolation. _

_She takes her granddaughter into her arms, and the images of the little boy who would never walk or talk or call out to his mother in the night assaults my mind. The hopelessness, usually so uncommonly absent in a house full of monsters, overwhelms me, and my Mother's story hits me like a great weight…_

Up Next: Sloth


	15. Sloth 1

She remembers her world only in happy pieces now. She sees lazy afternoons in the branches of trees, stealing apples and eating to her heart's content and she avoids the memory of the spicy scent that bled from the bark as she watched her childhood shelter tumble lifelessly into the river below. She rejoices in the beautiful marked breaths of her infant son that sang her to sleep every night…the hearty cries that woke her every morning, and the sound of the stone cold silence of his tiny blue lips as she laid him to rest in the frozen earth is hidden deep inside her in a place she doesn't even know still exists.

Esme's very first memories are of her canyon. The breeze from its rocky depths still plays in her mind just as it played with her and her sister's hair as they swung, carefree, from the branches of their tree and into an ocean of sky. It only barely echoes on the recollection of another canyon and another breeze at the end of her ties to reality.

She was quite attracted to danger as a child. If there was a new way to die suddenly in the relatively young forests around Columbus, Ohio, Esme was the first to have tried it. She reminds me of someone quite dear to my heart in these moments, now that I stop to think about it. The pulse of adrenaline through her veins seemed to have already become an incurable addiction by the age of only six, and not a day passed that she didn't return with a new battle scar. She wore them proudly as proof to herself and everyone around her that she had no plans to make life easy. They were often painful, but her sister had a talent for taking the hurt away.

It was on one of their perilous adventures that both Esme and her sister stumbled across the canyon. The river that flowed in the center so far below them had sliced a jagged crescent through the peaceful countryside. The constant force of the wind through its granite walls and the violent slash of the rain kept the wound from ever healing, and the raging rapids far below opened it ever more. Esme felt its pull immediately. It called to her in the wind and sang to her in dreams of infinite freedom.

It was her sister that found the tree. Gnarled and ancient, the trunk adorned with deep green leaves and sturdy branches that hung precariously over the edge of the canyon, it seemed to beg them both to come and live within its feathery green leaves. It was in the branches that her first discovered the depth of her sister's sadness. It was looking out over the canyon where her sister first admitted to Esme the entirely different pull that it had for her...the inexplicable need to put an end to the darkness that came with the obligations of becoming a woman, and that no one seemed to be able to understand or escape.

Esme sat helpless, listening to her sister…wanting to comfort her, but she found herself unable to do so. This was one of the many mysteries of adulthood, and she was still a child, unable to understand the pain that the world eventually cast upon everyone. That fact floated there somewhere in between them, making all of her intentions hollow. She tried anyway…she smiled and played and sang for her sister…everything that would bring happiness to the mind of a child. She gave her sister the very first piece of herself...tried to rebuild the child that was dying inside of her as the adult invaded, but Esme was still too young to understand the power of despair.

Only _she_ seemed to understand what had happened the night that her beautiful sister…her healer of battle wounds, and her keeper of secrets, disappeared, however. Esme led them to the canyon with tears in her eyes. She understood the sad song on the wind. They did not.

Their tree became filled with shattered dreams then and she sat in the branches staring out into nothing and waiting for a sister that would never return...tiny hands hiding a tiny tear streaked face. Small scraped knees sheltering a small body from the ravages of reality, and somewhere within the confines of a heart that knew no prejudice, the first tiny stone fell into place—the first brick in a wall that never should have begun. Her sister's had already been completed.

Esme didn't cry in front of her mother. She could see the pain of her own tears reflected ten fold in the lines of that face. Instead, she retreated to the branches of the tree alive with memories and mourned the loss of her partner in adventures unnumbered in her own way. She watched from above as the river flowed on, uncaring, and life moved on without her sister, and she felt a second tiny stone fall into place...and the bricks became a section that helped with the pain. Her mother was inside crying.

It was her love for her mother that finally brought Esme away from the canyon. She threw herself into helping with the chores…the cooking…the garden...the trips into town...anything that would keep her from noticing the sudden silence in the house that came with being the only child left alive. Her mother never fully recovered. She walked lifelessly through the house humming the songs that her sister used to play on a piano that now stood silent, gathering dust in the parlor. Her movements were slow and grey…and so, it seemed, was the time that passed.

But Esme's spirit had not died with her sister. It had not been bent by the years of crushing shadow in her home. She gave another piece of her soul to her beloved mother…dedicated her childhood and her very first lullaby to making her whole again, and though the carefree laughter that had once come so freely had disappeared with that tiny piece of soul, the unconditional love that Esme had acquired from her sister had pulled her mother through the depths of depression and into a conditional form of happiness.

And so it was with certain triumph that Esme allowed the call of the canyon to guide her that day, nearly ten years later, with her mother trailing nonchalantly behind her. She climbed out to the farthest branches as she had always done, feeling the wind tempting her further and further out. She smiled into the sun, whispering a silent hello to her sister.

Her mother's scream was what startled her. It was a panicked plea for her to come away from the edge, but as Esme turned instinctively, her legs slipped and the branches suddenly disappeared from beneath her. There was one moment, when she felt the breeze drifting up from below her, that Esme was certain she would follow her sister and leave her mother insane, but then her grasping hands found leaves, and she clung to them. It was enough to stop her plunge into the abyss, but not enough to save her entirely. She fell hard onto her right leg. There was a sickening crunch, a pain that seemed to blossom in her entire body, and then Esme saw nothing more.

She opened her eyes to the most beautiful color that she had ever seen. Gold, almost like honey, but with traces of something darker. Eyes like she had not imagined in a lifetime of dreams, blazing with concern as they scanned her face for signs of consciousness. Esme grinned weakly and the smile she received in return caused her heart to stop. She'd seen this face before…somewhere…in a dream?

He was her doctor, and he seemed to be amazingly effective. Her leg had been set and placed in a cast while she had been unconscious, but there was still a risk of chips of bone breaking off into the bloodstream...a reason to stay for a few days and heal. She gazed into those eyes and could not find a single reason to protest.

A broken leg is exquisitely painful, and so most of Esme's stay was spent in an ether haze. She listened, half awake as daily hospital life carried on around her. It faded into a series of blurs that only seemed to clear when he came to see her. The shadows under his eyes grew steadily worse, and the darkness seemed to have overtaken the gold.

Esme felt as if there were something inside him that her sixteen year old self did not understand…a secret pain, maybe…something that called to her as powerfully as the winds in the canyon. When he smiled at her--a smile that grew more and more difficult as the days passed--she wanted more than anything to wrap her arms around him and protect him…from what she had no idea, but she thought perhaps…himself? She was too young to feel for him anything more than the desire to be near him, but even that seemed strangely exhilerating.

He visited her often as the pain faded into a less constant pulse, though his spirits did not seem to rise. A strange fever was affecting the outlying areas, and he had already lost six patients, his last a mother of three. He spoke to Esme quietly of exercising caution, and she responded in the tones of a child who had not yet recognized her own mortality. This seemed to amuse him.

The night before she was to leave, he came in one last time to check the set of her cast. The defeat in his eyes radiated into her, and Esme imagined that the fever had claimed more during the day. He did not seem to even see her as he asked himself what was the use of helping just one when so many around were already dead, and she gave him the only answer that she knew...

Saving one or two may not change the world, or even the course of an epidemic, but it had changed the life of that one person. That child would smile and play...and walk again because of his efforts.

His eyes seemed to soften at this. Those penetrating eyes had been a regular feature in her dreams since she had first awakened to them. When she was released into her mother's care, Esme felt strangely as if she were leaving yet another piece of herself with the strange, beautiful doctor. In all the itme that he had cared for her, she had never even learned his name, but his eyes were burned into her memory.

Those eyes still appear in the places between sleep and awake nearly a year later when her father's cries pulled him away. She woke to find her mother dead beside an empty bottle of laudanum.

It had been an accident. The laudanum had been for Esme's leg...never taken, of course, because pain was something that Esme had refused to allow in her life. After her last child's brush with death, however, pain had seemed to be all that was allowed in her mother's life. The laudanum seemed to numb it...at moments.

All of the color went out of her world as Esme stared at the last cloudy droplets spilled over her mothers beautiful nightdress. Time seemed to take on a life of its own. It stopped and raced somehow at the same time. She stood brave and unblinking as the piece of her soul that she had given her mother was swallowed unceremoniously by the same earth that covered her coffin. Esme blinked back a vision of dead, staring eyes, and then she could stand no more. She escaped to the canyon again, feeling it draw her more than ever. She needed the breeze to dry her tears, and the open space to stop the sudden claustrophobia that seemed to suffocate her.

She sat for hours clinging to a tree that was rooted in her fantasy, eleven years from the day her sister had left her alone in the branches, and she promised herself that this was the last time that its limbs would hide tears. The sense of foreboding was clear to her now. The day Esme's mother was buried marked the beginning of a never-ending play on life, and she cried for the loss of her mother, and happiness, and a tree that would no longer hold her secrets. She climbed to the farthest branches and watched from above as the same river flowed on and life went on once again without her mother, and somewhere within a heart now more scarred and battered, another stone fell…and another scar was covered, blocking emotion from another place inside her.

Those strange golden eyes...somehow just as emotionless...flashed in her mind as the wind took away her tears. The canyon was calling her name…


	16. Sloth 2

She didn't heed its call. A few years later, she would live to regret that decision, but at the moment, Esme's heart still harbored the smallest flicker of hope—a foreshadowing of a life that she had yet to live and a family that would one day need the love that she could not feel then. Something whispered quietly to her of a future that was very different than the bleak, stormy remnants that she was imagining.

_His eyes_…

They were such an extraordinary color…so strangely beautiful and ancient all at once.

The days…weeks…months that passed were shades of grey—mind-numbing and dizzying in their repetitiveness. There was no life left in the tiny house that had once been a home. Her blood ran sluggish and her memories invaded…took over completely. She followed the instincts that told her to eat…to sleep…to wake in the morning. She followed even stronger ones that told her that her father needed to be cared for and comforted, but the eternal cloud cover that had entered her life prevented any more than that.

She wandered often, ending up more times than not in the branches of her tree. Esme had spent her childhood there, contemplating life and discovering the strength to overcome it. She did not think about the mysteries life held anymore…she didn't think at all. She sat with her head back against the massive trunk and remembered the eyes that reminded her of how beautiful life could have been…and of course, she listened to the wind.

It sang of change.

The song created inside her a wanderlust that she could not explain. An urge to leave this place so full of melancholy moments slowly began to overwhelm her, and her search for adventures untold began again. Suddenly, there was a tiny point of a most beautiful blue in her life again—and gold…there had always been gold.

The west seemed like the best possibility. Miles of untamed wilderness were a perfect place to rebuild her tattered life…

Esme's father had another plan…and his name was Charles Evenson.

He was plain and quiet…and rooted firmly to the land. Her heart told her that he would take what was left of her soul, but her mind was thinking only of her father. His health had been failing for quite some time, and Esme doubted that he could live without her if she followed her heart to places unknown. She swiftly found herself facing the choice between the death of her father or the death of her spirit.

Was it ever really a decision?

And so she found herself at the lip of her canyon once again staring up at a tree that seemed to smile lovingly back, the white satin of a beautiful wedding dress snagged and the folds stained a tearful green from the branches that seemed to stretch toward her and invite her to a world that she was no longer a part of, and somewhere inside a heart that was already too accustomed to sacrifice, another stone fell...and it somehow made the ring on her finger easier to bear. Her husband was coming to take her home…to a home that she had never seen.

Esme didn't cry in front of her father. She kissed him stoically on the cheek and said goodbye to her mother and her sister and the peices of herself that were still alive in the home that she had always known. She blinked back the tears…pushed the image of _his_ profoundly calm eyes away forever, and watched in silence as the canyon fell into the background…as the river flowed on and life went on without her in the tiny cottage, and the stones inside her heart began to cover all hope.

The grey that had defined her life before her marriage became violent shades of purple…fading to twisted amber…fading to nothing again, just like the bruises that seemed to be a permanent adornment on her fragile form from the day that she entered into life with a monster.

Her father watched her die inside…compared her death to the one that he was slowly suffering, and left well enough alone. Esme pushed past the bruises and washed his wounds and well as those of her deplorable husband. She cleaned two houses, cooked two dinners, tended two gardens, washed two men's clothing…died one slow death.

When the beatings became too much, she would escape again...run the long road, filling her hair with dust, and climb into the arms of her precariously perched tree. She would smile at her sister in the sun, and sing to her mother in the branches, and try to stop the bleeding. Her life was black. She didn't even remember gold anymore.

He would find her there…tear her from her refuge and drag her back into the darkness.

And then the world around her went black as well. The newspapers rang of the horrors of a war playing out in a far away land that she had never seen. Esme paid no attention. There were horrors at home to avoid…fists to dodge. But it seemed that the hands of violence spread even farther than she could ever imagine, and suddenly, all able-bodied men were being sent across the ocean to fight.

And Charles was gone. Off to a place where his violence would be useful.

There was only one man to care for, and she joyfully returned to the happy rhythms that memory told her created a true home. Her father was a breath of fresh air after her husband, and she cared for him with joy, though his condition had been steadily declining as he had watched his daughter's health doing the same. Unlike her, he did not seem to recover.

A piece of Esme's heart went into saving her father. He soon found himself limited to bed rest, and trips to the hospital were a regular occurrence. She found herself searching the sterile halls for the strange doctor who had once saved her leg when many would not have been able to. She wondered if he could fix her father like that…thrilled at the possibility to see him again after so many years but, of course, he was long gone.

Her father was buried beside her mother's grassy grave and her sister's empty one. Esme did not attend his funeral. She did not escape to her tree, and she did not go near the canyon. She understood its pull now all too well, and she feared that she could not resist. She escaped instead to the river below.

She lay on her back in the shadows of trees that were nowhere near as inviting and listened to the wind whisper its dirge, and stared up at her father as he passed through the canyon with the clouds…they always passed so quickly. She watched from below now, as the river roared on, and life went on without everyone she loved, and another stone fell into place…and the wall was well on its way to completion.

Amazingly, it was that wall that kept Esme alive when her husband returned from the war, bitter and brooding, and filled with memories of a violence that he seemed determined to share with her. She had only one escape, and she fled there often. The hope that its branches provided her seemed to undermine the beatings that she took all too often, and her husband grew darker.

There was a storm on the wind the day that she sat with tears in her eyes, nursing new wounds and watching the ax cut deeper and deeper into the ancient maple. The wind lashed at its leaves, sending them relentlessly into the face of its attacker, but the blows did not stop. The sweet aroma of its sap—its lifeblood—filled her lungs, and the liquid amber color brought to her mind something that she could not quite place…something from a happy time when she had not been forced to watch as her last piece of solace fell lifelessly into the canyon in an uneventful explosion of bark…and the wall began to block out the last rays of light in her life.

She wanted to follow the tree into the beautiful blue…but there was another life to consider now. A small one that grew inside of her and promised to tear down the wall around her battered heart.

And the wind sang of change.

Esme wasted no more time on tears. She made her preparations, silently stealing the car that she'd never cared to drive, and the money that the law said could never be hers, and she slipped into the night while her husband slept…headed west, of course, and north with a heart full of sorrow and a steadily expanding belly. She had relatives in Milwaukee. The name seemed exotic enough.

She stayed with her cousin for a few weeks, and then found the perfect escape—a cabin far in the woods where she would never be questioned, and a job as a schoolteacher. It had been her dream all along—that, and the role of mother.

She gave birth to her child in the worst blizzard she had ever seen. There was no possibility of making it to the hospital in Ashland, and so Esme's cries blended with the shrieks of the icy wind that froze the forest around her. She doesn't remember the pain. Mothers rarely do, but she remembers the first strong breath of her dark eyed son as one of the happiest moments of her life. It filled her with a sudden purpose…a new power that she had never known existed.

She remembers it now with something close to reverie. It was the thought that was frozen in her mind as she watched him turn cold and blue in her arms only months later. It had been the worst winter in years. The snow had piled around the cabin, blocking her in. Esme knew that he was ill, just as she knew that a frantic trip to the town doctor would have killed him for certain.

There was nothing she could have done, really. She tried to go for the doctor herself several times, but the snow had blocked her in completely, and she understood that she would have died in the cold along the way and left her son to starve. She held him as he cried, his breaths broken with tiny intermittent coughs that seemed horribly out of place coming from an infant. She sang him her lullaby…she'd already given him every last piece of her soul.

He died in her arms. Esme died with him.


	17. Sloth 3

The final stone fell into place…and the wall blocked the last ray of hope and the last possibility of light.

And suddenly Esme was stumbling through the snow with no memory of how she had arrived there. There was a moment of panic as she wondered who was looking after the baby, and then reality hit her again, and she plunged on with a mad cry. She was looking for her tree…for the canyon. She knew somehow that it existed now only in her mind, but she persisted, understanding that her mind was the only thing left alive inside of her, and that it would take her there eventually.

Her son cried his hearty cry inside her head…laughed his first bubbling laughter…coughed ominously. He was cold. Lying in his cradle back in the cabin, he was cold. She was too.

And then it was there.

It wasn't _her_ canyon. It wasn't a canyon at all, but merely a sharp drop that gave way to the lights of the houses below. She had found her way to town. How long had she been walking? She looked down at blue hands that she could no longer feel and she imagined that it must have been a while.

A tiny miracle that sang in his own mysterious babble and laid one warm, tiny hand on her heart, always, as she fed him flashed before her. She saw that hand and understood that nothing would be warm again. Esme had found her way to the end of all things. It had always been a cliff…that was why the canyon had always drawn her.

Time seemed to freeze, then, just as her own body was slowly freezing. The wind died around her, and she couldn't help but gaze into the void below her and imagine….If she jumped, would she scream…would she die?

_Tiny lips forming into his very first smile…_

Would she land on the rocks? In the trees below?

_Impossibly soft skin, fragile and so warm that it melted her heart…_

She let her eyes close to the rest of the world. Reality was peeling away now, and fantasy had left her behind long ago. She leaned as far out as she dared to, feeling herself slipping away—feeling her feet slip precariously halfway off the edge.

_The tiniest feet that she had ever seen, and a heart that beat so fast…so strong…_

For the last time, Esme smiled, and stood tall into the wind. Then with all of the strength she could gather, she leaped…

_His lips had been blue… _

Cold.

Colder.

And then fire.

It raged through her. It screamed at her from the corners where death had been hiding, and she screamed back. It was too much for her to endure. It burned away the grey and the black and gave way to an explosion of red…only deep blazing red. She opened her eyes.

And saw gold.

The same eyes that had watched over her in the hospital so long ago. The same eyes that had haunted her dreams and played in the places where hope had been hidden in all of the years that had passed since her accident…the _very_ same eyes.

The same hands touched her burning brow. The same concern spread across the same angelic face as he whispered pictures to her of eternal life. It made the pain nearly bearable. She writhed, and listened…screamed and absorbed everything that he had to say. There was time to fear the idea of immortality. There was time to cry for her poor, silent baby boy. There was time to mourn the children that would never be born and the mother that she had been and would never be again…It seemed to last forever.

He never left her side. His eyes never wavered from her face. I did not see Esme transformed. She came to us covered in blood, and I was still painfully young, but I felt her pain inside her thoughts. I lived her confusion as her human life burned away, and I was blown away by the strength of the love that blossomed in that room so quickly between them. It frightened me. It frightened them both. After so many years…after so many dreams had brought him to her, and so many nightmares had pushed him away, Esme had finally discovered that he had always been for her, and she had always been his.

The love that emanated from her when she saw me—so young and so seemingly lost in my own world of pain—frightened me even more. I had never experienced a feeling so strong and so freely given. The tears that she had cried for the sons that she would never have…her final tears…seemed horribly wasted. I was Esme's son from the moment she laid eyes upon me. Her thoughts gave me peace after two years of turmoil. I loved her immediately.

Her mortal child—her tiny fallen angel, only four days departed—still played on her mind. Esme saw his frozen body lying unceremoniously in a cabin that would not be found again until spring and her heart broke. She longed suddenly to find him. To say her goodbyes and to lay him to rest in the only place that seemed correct. A beautiful canyon flashed into her memories, and a great grey stump covered in vines that would serve as a headstone.

We accompanied her. She needed us there…needed Carlisle's arms around her as she was wracked with tearless sobs staring at a little face that seemed so perfect even in death…needed his guidance and his control to travel the great distance to her childhood home, and his strong hands to pull her away from the grave when her baby boy was finally laid to rest.

And when we had arrived. When we were gathered there at canyon edge and she caught the scent of something familiar on the wind, Esme needed me.

It was the scent of human blood. We both smelled it, and it burned uncontrollably inside both of us. I caught her thoughts only a fraction of a second before she lurched forward, but it was enough to restrain her…enough to give Carlisle the opportunity to take her in his arms, and enough to hear her rage as she recognized the human that was nearing our position.

She filled my mind with memories of hurt and hate, bruises and blood. It was the last of these that drove me over the edge. It was him. The scent was from the man that had caused my mother so many years of pain. He was headed toward the canyon, and his certain death. Carlisle couldn't stop us both. He seemed to understand this, and his thoughts became a desperation and an attempt at reason that I refused to listen to.

It was _Esme's_ thoughts that made me pause as the human stepped foolishly into the clearing that he had created by cutting down her tree. She stopped struggling and her thoughts were suddenly filled with only love for me and the certainty that no son of hers would lose his humanity on such a deplorable human being. I was once again taken aback by the strength and sincerity behind her feelings.

Carlisle seemed to understand. He set her free and watched as the love of his existence faced the mortal father of her dead child.

It is only now, after I've found the one that I would die for, that I can begin to understand how difficult it had to have been for Carlisle to allow that monster to live. Standing there behind her, resisting the scent of the fear that exuded from every abhorrent pore in his body.

I understood altogether too well exactly how hard it was for _her_. His blood called to me, the fear making it sweeter. I don't know how she resisted.

Esme's voice was trembling as she pointed at the tiny plot of earth and spoke the first and last words that I have ever heard her utter in hatred:

_He was your son. He's dead now, and so am I. I was never meant for you, and I will never think of you again, but I can see in your eyes that you know exactly what I could do to you now. What my son could do to you._

And I wanted to more than anything in that moment...

_What you see in our eyes now is murder. It will stay with you for the rest of your life, and you will know that the only reason you're alive is because I let you live._

He ran then, and it took every piece of Esme's self restraint to let him go. She was still and silent until his scent disappeared, clutching Carlisle with a grip that caused him pain, and then she turned to her struggling, dark eyed new son. He was thirsty. He needed to hunt.

The wind drifted up from the canyon, and inside her head it was one of the most beautiful melodies that I have every heard.

I promised myself that I would write it down for her as I followed my parents to our home.

And it _was_ a home now.


	18. The Third Level

**Sorry this one took so long...I blame it on midterms and forced writing. And of course the fact that this is one of my favorites and I _really_ wanted to do him justice! Hope I don't disappoint.**

**The third level of Hell in _Inferno_ is reserved for the Gluttons...**

* * *

_The room is filled with secret smiles as seven pale figures reflect on the concept of home and one retreats to the darkness of his own silent reverie, exuding a terrified reluctance that floats around the room like a cloud of poison, stealing the smile from every face. His tale is next. I glance over at my quiet Brother. His eyes reflect an apology, but the emotions of five tales told still radiate in painful waves around us all…still burn in the agony that is frozen onto his face as he retreats further into the shadows and watches the remnants of the death of his Mother slowly drifting away._

_He walks with a swagger that tells the world he doesn't care, and he hides the chaos of a thousand emotions that have never been his inside a mask of nonchalance as he observes the room from the darkness of the corner. It has been his penance for years—to watch from a distance…from the shadows…from the rooftops…from behind the one he loves, knowing that proximity brings instincts that he has never known how to control. _

_His golden eyes drift warily to his newborn sister, and he wishes for the power that she has brought with her into immortality…the will to push away instinct and revel in the beauty of her half mortal daughter without pain. His thoughts shift to our second Sister, still in the arms of our enormous Brother, and he wishes for a reality like hers—where emotions are minor annoyances…like his memories of walking through the fields of victims…the flies that would wonder why he was still alive. His attention flickers from Brother to Brother, but he wishes for nothing from us. We each have our only secret burdens to carry. It is the bond that joins us all together._

_The world is a constant swirl of deepest red for him…an endless crimson flowing river of blood, warm and excruciating. His control and his resistance are unbelievably strong—the strongest I have ever seen in an immortal, and still he fights with the illusion that he is the weakest of his brothers because he does not see the constant draw of human blood in the emotions of us all. He suffers in unknowing silence, his craving reflected sevenfold—eightfold now, and he feels the burning thirst within us all._

_He steals away in the nights, when the needs of his own family become too much to bear. He likes to dodge cars on the freeway…to sit in the shadows and feel the human lives passing by him, so absorbed in their own little pieces of forever…where yesterday awaits them and tomorrow sleeps in. There are no feelings of resistance or sacrifice…no insatiable incomprehensible lust to drink…to kill everything and just drink until the pain is gone...there are only he simple shallow emotions of those who could never understand eternity, and he finds a certain peace...the peace that he found first in a being without a past—my Sister._

_His eyes follow his dark angel as she dances slowly around the room. They carry with them the allure of confusion. He followed her into the light and now he likes to stare until her fire burns into his eyes and consumes everything…every stray emotion…replaces them with sweet abandon. He no longer has to pretend that it doesn't cause him pain. Nothing hurts him anymore—not even the thirst—as long as he can still feel her near._

_He takes her in his arms, absorbing the peace that she has brought into his existence after too many lifetimes of war. He thinks in terms of battlefields and casualties…of the struggle for power and an unending desire to feed. His life and death have been a never ending search for more...more to drink…more to fight…more to kill. When his thirst was quenched, there was always someone else to project their own desire. When his hatred faded, there was always someone there to bring him back into his own darkness. The hunger was always unceasing, the need never once satisfied…until she came into his life and filled the air with her strange music. Now, it has become the rhythm of his silent heart._

_The reluctance fades from the air around us, replaced by a strange serenity as he becomes lost in eyes that do not reflect a past. His thoughts flicker into another century, giving me his beginnings, and his permission to turn them into the sixth sin of our miniature inferno. With his death lingering near, and only mine waiting in the distance, I step into my Brother's past and begin his violent tale…_

**Up Next: Gluttony**


	19. Gluttony 1

**I apologize for taking so long. This semester ia absolutely killing me! I've discovered that I really love Jasper's story. It's the most traumatic and involves the most amount of internal struggle. I could prabably write 40,000 words on it! I'm having trouble keeping it short, so this might become a three entry story like Esme's! Bear with me.**

* * *

He was born into a life of war in a land that had already survived assaults from the south, from the north, and from within. Two brothers had died before him in the endless feuds that had made the south a stereotype, and only he had been left to care for their families and the pieces of his own that remained.

When war tore the entire country apart, he was still very young, but far from a child. By the time the fighting reached his father's lands, there was not even a question in his mind as to whether he would go. Battle was in his blood. Five generations had gone before him onto scarred fields, and five generations called for him to do the same. He entered into the Confederate Army at age sixteen with bright eyes, and fed on tales of honor and promises of glory.

But war carries nothing more than death and the illusions of glory. This lesson he learned quickly as he watched his companions fall around him, screaming and choking on their own blood, struck down by stray bullets from their own company-issued weapons, or charging on into the fray, leaving behind a piece of themselves…and too many fallen friends.

He watched the men return bleeding from ominous bullet holes and pleading with him not to let them die. They came in the night missing an arm, or having left a foot…or worse, their own sanity on the field. Entire regimens would be demolished in one day, and yet he remained as unscathed as those who had accompanied him. He told himself that it was for this reason alone that they followed him. He played it off as nothing more than charisma that he was promoted so quickly, but he knew that it was more.

He had an inherent talent for war, and an innate ability to know the limits of each man under his charge. He studied the battlefield just as his men studied their makeshift chessboards in rare moments of piece, and he read the battle as easily as others read their bibles. The enemy was something predictable to him, and the men who followed him knew this. They obeyed him without question. He quickly earned their undying loyalty, and he repaid them by bringing as many of them as he could back alive.

It was a bleak war and the life of a soldier was limited. The eyes of those who had died under him haunted him often. He pushed them away with letters from his family, and imagined the peace of his father's ranch where he would retreat when the conflict was over. He found it very difficult to imagine. How could there be peace after so much death?

Then came the first battle of Galveston. He had known something was about to happen. His instinct by now had become almost a sixth sense. There was something in the air…an indefinable sense of unease. The camp was too quiet and he awoke that morning with the sensation of having been watched during the night. His worries were confirmed when orders came in for his men to begin a complete relocation of all of the civilians that were in range of the Union mortar boats. The enemy was coming by sea.

The fear in the air was palpable. He saw it in the eyes of the women and children that were quickly gathering in the ports to be the first ones out, and he observed its clever progress as it crept gradually into the faces of all of his men. All eyes turned toward the coast as the preparations were made, and yet his eyes were drawn inland—to the north.

His men were on the first and largest boat, strategically placed there to control the well-expected panic of the largest amount of civilians. It was not panic that marked the journey north to Houston however, but gloom…and a strange sense of foreboding that refused to fade from the mind of the major in charge. It was this premonition of sorts that caused him to leave his men at the port and ride south again toward Galveston.

He'd been right to make the journey. In doing so, he saved dozens of lives. Two of the three women he met only a mile outside of Galveston were newborns, and not easily controlled. All of them had been headed into the city to feed. Had they encountered the panicked crowds gathered at the ports, it most likely would have been a massacre. Instead, there was only one heart that stopped beating that night.

They were the most beautiful creatures that he had seen in his short life. He feels foolish now, having ignored instinct completely in favor of chivalry, but after nearly half a decade of bearing witness to the atrocities of war, resisting the innocent beauty that he saw in the dark one's face was not an option. Her voice was so calm and confident…not at all like the women and children that still awaited rescue in Galveston. He was instantly curious, and yet there was something just beyond her smile that drove chills up his spine…an indefinable need that she would do anything for. He did not understand why he was not already on his horse heading toward the safety of the city, except for the fact that his instinct was telling him that he was already too late. He was already gone.

He remembers her fragile pale hands in his hair…remembers pulling his pistol is a daze as the strength began to leave his legs…remembers asking her what she had done to him as the pain began in his shoulder…remembers the ice in her smile as she responded.

_I've killed you Jasper._

His pistol was pointed at her heart. He had never killed a woman before, but the pain in his shoulder was spreading quickly, down into the arm that held the gun. He knew that he had only seconds before he lost the strength to hold it…knew that she was only waiting for that weakness. He had no choice. He shot her.

The last thing he heard before he gave in to the darkness was her laughter. They last thing he saw was her dark eyes as she closed the distance impossibly fast between them.

They were red…as red as the blood that tainted her eager lips.

The dark one stayed with him, whispering to him as he writhed in agony, unable to escape her and burning with hatred for the pale monster at his side. For three days, he listened to tales of conquest but never defeat…of battle but never of peace…of violence but never once of death, and he came to understand something of the horrors that she had brought upon him. She soothed him when he cried out, and laughed when he cursed the ground she walked on. Her cold touch became a constant presence, and her musical whisper became his only link to the conscious world as the venom worked its way into every cell of his body, destroying and reconstructing…creating a soldier unlike any that lay bleeding in the battlefields of the world…crafting an unstoppable murderer.

After three long nights, he slowly began to gain control again. The pain that had taken over all of his senses began to fade, and he was suddenly aware of a strange blur of desire that flowed in like the tide over the barrier of pain that had been holding it at bay. It was a sudden eager excitement…a poorly masked desire for power…a need to kill…an insatiable thirst.

It was this emotion that caused him to rise in disgust and confusion. She was there by his side, somehow different. Everything around him was different—more…present…than anything had ever been before. He stared at the girl and a sudden jolt of desire…for him…for blood…flowed from her and over him. He pushed away from her, and was on the other side of the room before he knew it. He moved too quickly. He saw too much. He could taste the scents in the air, and there was something in there that caused his throat to burst into flame. It was mind numbing and beyond tempting.

The dark one smiled and stared knowingly into the corner.

An old man clothed in scraps that had once been a Confederate uniform stared up at him, an immobilizing shock reflected clearly on his weathered face. He was grasping a small blond boy of about eleven who was radiating a fear that he had only felt before from those who knew they were about to die. He did not have time to ponder this, because the scent that was causing him so much pain was emanating directly from them. An urge to end the pain…to open their throats and drink their blood, blinded him momentarily, and he was instantly disgusted.

He looked around at Maria in confusion, and he hated the evil smirk he found there—the sense of triumph that exuded inexplicably from her. He turned to attack her, but something in his arms prevented him from going for the dagger that he kept in his boot. He looked down in horror at the corpse of the old man held tightly in his grasp. His throat was open, but no blood poured from the wound. The boy was on the floor beside him, pale and cold, and just as dead.

He let out a choked moan as he realized that he had done this. The memories of their warm blood spilling into his mouth were suddenly lucid pictures in his mind. He pushed away from them and towards his small captor. Her pleasure fell around him…consuming him, and horrifying him. How could she feel pleasure at the death of two innocents? How could _he_? His glare fell uncomprehendingly onto the girl, and he saw his horror reflected momentarily on her face—horror, and then a shocked confusion…then again triumph. Strange emotions that all fell around him like a cloud…almost visible…definitely tangible. He cried out.

_What are you doing to me?_

Her answer gave him nothing, and was accompanied by a fresh wave of victory.

_I knew you would be special._

And then desire overpowered him completely, blocking all rational thought, and his mind was filled with the need to be close to her…to kiss those red lips…those intoxicating eyes…to take her in his arms…to drink…to kill…to _drink_…

_NO!_

His mind exploded into a disgusted rage. He filled it with a burning hate for the creature that watched him from the corner…pushed it all towards her with every ounce of strength that he had. Her face melted into a grimace that was not quite pain. She was struggling with the volume of her voice as she admonished him.

_Stop it!_

His terror reflected in her eyes, and he noticed once more that those eyes were tinted a dark scarlet. He backed away from her, slowly going for his knife. She watched him with the same expression, whispering him to stop…to calm down…to listen to what she had to say. Her voice was still so hypnotizing to him that for a moment, he paused, half-crouched and considered her request, and that is when he caught his own reflection in the mirror by the window. Horrified blood red eyes stared back at him. He watched as the last hint of rational thought disappeared from them, and then he was screaming.

And the girl was screaming too.

_Up Next: More Gluttony_


	20. Gluttony 2

**Thank you so much for those of you who continue to read and review. Every review makes my day, I promise. I would respond to every single one, if I didn't feel creepy sending that many PM's! **

**A special thanks again to Lisa Steiner, who is translating Purgatory into Portuguese, and helping me a great deal (though without knowing it) with my Spanish translation.**

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Somewhere inside him, he recognized that the fear radiating off of the girl was directed towards him. It had debilitated her for only a fraction of a second, and he used the opportunity to run from her…toward the window and into freedom. He threw himself against the glass expecting pain, but it shattered with the slightest touch, and suddenly he was running…faster than he could have imagined. He somehow knew that his speed should have been impossible…that humans could not see him, and yet he could see everything clearly as he passed by…could feel everything around him and smell it all on the wind…taste it…it was all agonizing. The pain came in sudden overwhelming jabs, and disappeared just as quickly…but never entirely.

He passed farms…camps…the outskirts of small towns. He passed a camp full of Yankee soldiers and the scent of their wounded caused his world to go black for a moment. He concentrated on the memory of the old man, dead in his grasp, and he forced himself to continue running. He ran to escape the girl that had been a monster. He ran to escape the monster that she had awoken inside of him, and he slowed only when a strange new pain exploded in his stomach.

He was in a meadow not far from the Union camp. Their scent was still in the air. His mind screamed at him not to stop…to put more distance between them, but his body would no longer comply. He stopped and doubled over as the sudden urge to vomit overtook him. A gush of violent red exploded from his mouth, turning the wildflowers around him into a crime scene in an instant. He had seen this happen before to other men on the field of battle…recognized it as a sign that his own death was imminent, and a fury washed over him. He would not die a soldier. He would not carry with him the honor of his father before him. He would die on his knees in a meadow, far from the front and trying to escape. His eyes clamped shut in protest.

But his rage was quickly broken by a strange sense of calm, and when he opened his eyes again, they met the murderous ones of the girl. How had she followed him?

You drank too much. You killed too many.

The desire in her voice this time was not the same twisted thing behind all of her movements. It calmed him, and he became lost for a few moments, listening to the colors that it brought back to him. There was a worry hidden in the deepest part of the melody.

Come back with me before you attract attention.

And from behind her hypnotic whisper, he heard the screaming begin in the distant Yankee camp. The air was filled with fear and betrayal, and the night rang with the cries of a massacre. He looked down at the meadow floor tainted dark with his own blood, and fresh, new, horrifying memories flooded his mind…of grasping and pleading…and so much murder in so little time. The blood on the ground was not his. It was the blood of the Yankee wounded. He had taken them without thought…without even the slightest struggle.

He remembered the message behind the girl's tranquil whisper during the past three days, and it all fell horribly into place. He would not die tonight. He would never die. But so many more would at his hands. Panic again. He watched it tense all of the muscles under his pale skin, and followed its progress to the face of the girl.

What have you done to me!?

She was fighting with her emotions. I've made you special.

I killed them!

I've made you perfect.

You made me a murderer!

Her hands were on his face, soothing him. Her voice whispered into his ear…her desire for him was intoxicating. There was no regret as she leaned in to kiss his neck. Only a calm triumph that was so much more appealing than the pain that he had felt moments ago. He gave in to her touch.

You are a soldier, Jasper. You have been a murderer since the day they put a gun in your hand. I've just given you better weapons.

She filled the air with such certainty and confidence…the only semblance of control that he could ever know now…and suddenly he understood that if he did not follow her back, he would kill another thirty or more by morning. There was no choice. The girl had played her game well. She had turned him into a slaughterer of the innocent before he had even awoken to this new consciousness. With the defeat thick around him and the hatred boiling just underneath his new stone skin, he took the tiny hand she offered him and followed her into the night.

That first day stands out in his memory as his darkest time. The weight of the dead came crushing down on him as he watched the sun rise apathetically in the east. He welcomed its light until he realized that its rays would not burn him to cinders as promised in so many legends. He tried to make use of his pistol then, and spent hours staring at the spent ball of lead that should have penetrated his skull, and instead lay broken and useless at his feet. He did not leave the protection of the dark room for days…weeks. He lost track of passing time. What was the rising and setting of a sun when rest was never an option? The only thing that marked his days now was the distant cries of the others that the three women were turning…creating an army of the damned.

The pain in his throat became a constant struggle, the swirl of other emotions a reminder that his world was no longer his to live. When the thirst became something unbearable, the girl—Maria—would bring him victims. He drank to make the pain go away…to make their fear stop inside his head, and when he could no longer feel it, he was grateful to her. He no longer understood which emotions were his own. He no longer believed that anything was real, but her desire for him was something tangible…he absorbed it, and during the time before he knew how to control his gift, he exuded it as freely as he felt it. It resonated and amplified so that he lived his first years in a constant cloud of bloodlust and desire.

He fought for her…but never with her…in innumerable battles. There was never any choice really. Once the first blood was spilled, the uncontrollable emotions of the newborns under her charge took him over completely. He took the lives of human and vampire alike…friend and enemy. There was no concept of control—no need for it. For every newborn he killed, there was another made. For every human gone, there were another ten, warm and tantalizing in the night. He finished each battle scarred and stinging from the venom of the enemy, covered in the blood that he had spilled and drank in his frenzy.

A few years after his newborn strength had faded, he began to notice a certain level of control. He found that he could resist the temptation for blood when he was alone. He focused on the victim's terror in their last moments of life, and it made resistance easier. A small ray of hope entered through the tightly shuttered window of his soul at the possibility that he might be able to break away from this life. There could be no true peace anymore…no going home ever again, but he allowed the idea of an escape from so much death to enter his mind for the first time since his turning.

He also realized that he was gaining control over the emotions that had become his constant companion. They affected him still…over that, he had very little control, but he found that he could pick out the emotions that he needed from the air and project them on to others. It proved to be a useful talent for Maria, who looked on with cruel caution as newborn deaths decreased and the numbers in her coven grew. If he had known that the calculation that had emanated from her every pore had been directed toward him, he would have left the first night he felt it. Instead, he stayed on, utterly convinced that his efforts at independence had gone unnoticed.

He walked into her trap with open arms.

Their conquests had led their army south toward Houston. Their plan had been to march on in the night toward the border where they were to take on one of the most powerful leaders that they had ever encountered. He had conquered nearly all of Mexico as his own personal herding ground. He had followed Maria that night with plans and strategies blocking his mind, and it wasn't until they were nearly to Houston that he realized the familiarity of the land. He watched in terror as the newborns advanced on the tiny farmhouse that his senses told him held nothing more than three women and three small children…his mother and the families of his two dead brothers. He stared desperately over at Maria, who wore a sickeningly familiar smirk and exuded the same triumph that he remembered from his first days. She had brought him home.

He resisted more than any young vampire could ever have hoped for. His mother's frightened cries awoke inside him the chivalrous instinct that he had imagined long dead. Alone, he fought off the newborns that he himself had trained. He knew how they moved. He knew where they were weak. Ten were dead before the scent of human blood hit him.

Newborn strength, he could resist. Newborn movements, he could fight, but their collective lust for the blood that was so near was his downfall in the end. He fought with his own thirst, suddenly amplified by more than twelve. His family was gathered in the corner of the kitchen. His mother had her arms around his oldest nephew. The boy looked so much like his father it was frightening. He eviscerated the newborn that lunged toward them first.

But their scent was in the air all around him. He felt it mingling with the need from every newborn left alive.

No.

Their blood was calling to him…calling to the children all around him. He stared back at the youngest boy. There were fresh scrapes on his little knees. The scent was so much stronger.

No!

The wind was thick with the blood already spilled from the farmhouses all around them, and they were only human after all…

NO! They were his family! The only memory he had of a life of peace!

He could smell it…taste it…he needed their blood flowing through him. There was no point in resisting. It would never stop. There was no point in denying it. He understood all too well what happened if he denied it.

But the children behind his protective stance were his last tie to humanity. He could not. He would not…

Jasper?

His mother's warm, trembling hand came from behind him. Rested suddenly on his shoulder too close to his impossibly white teeth, and his resistance broke.

NO!!!!!

His mother was the first to die. She had no time to feel fear…only a brief sense of joy at the return of her last son. It was not so with the others. The fear mixed with desire as he killed them all. It disappeared quickly, overpowered by the need of ten newborns as they scrambled over the corpses for the last warm blood.

And suddenly, he was ablaze with a hatred that he had never experienced before. The newborns fell one by one almost without resistance, distracted by the blood of his loved ones, but it did not seem to satisfy him. He moved, blinded by his fury, to the town that had been his second home during his human life. The whole town fell to his rage in a matter of minutes. His hate for her burned in his crimson eyes. His hate for himself was taken out on his neighbors.

It was their fault…their fault for being so fragile…their fault for practically begging to be killed at every moment of their short lives. How could he have ever been expected to fight against that? What was the point? He damned them all for making him this way. He damned her for doing this to him! He damned himself to the deepest pits of hell, for every death committed this night and so many before that. He wanted to die a thousand times over for what he knew was yet to come.

When the sun rose on the small Texas town, it reflected only in the milky eyes of the corpses that lay in the silent streets.

And on the brilliantly beautiful skin of their murderer as he followed his creator silently into the trees.

_Up next: Yup, you guessed it...it's going to be Gluttony until Alice makes it all better :)_


	21. Gluttony 3

**Once again, thank you so much for your patience. I had about 90 pages of final papers to write before I could get around to it, but I would stare at the folder with all of the chapters in it with a longing that I just couldn't remedy. **

**Please forgive the small liberty I took with the diologue at the end. I know a few lines aren't in the book, but I liked them!**

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Her point was maliciously demonstrated, but it had been received. He had been basing his future on the illusion that it was possible to gain control of what he was. In the end, the death of his family—his only hope in the world—had showed him that it was control that had become the illusion. There was no fighting what she had made him. There was no point in even attempting to resist it. He was a monster…and he was _good_ at being a monster. Out of the over twenty newborns that had begun the fight with him, only he and Maria were left standing. The rest were melting away in the inferno that had once been his childhood home. All he knew anymore was murder. All he understood was how to end life.

From that point on, his world was black again. For the decades that followed, he knew only a dull grey pain, shot through occasionally with the blackest bursts of hatred for anything around him. Maria was the only light he knew, and even this fact caused him pain. She existed as the cause of everything dark in his life, and yet she became the only one who could make it all fade away. When he could not find the will to escape her…when they were alone and away from the chaotic ramblings of countless newborns, the only emotion that she allowed him to feel was the desire for him that echoed from within herself.

Hate and desire…need and loathing. His life became a chain of pain and tiny moments of gracious apathy. He shut himself away from the daylight until he had forgotten what the sun felt like on his skin. He retreated far into himself, and for so many years, he only knew the emotions of the newborns…the need…the confusion. He hated them for it, and found a sick pleasure in following Maria's orders to end their fabricated lives when their strength began to wane.

Battle after battle…death after death…it was nothing. He had killed anything that had mattered to him in the world. Life was hate…only hate…and the girl by his side was the only relief. The black burned worse than the venom ever had and the only thing that made it go away was to see it in the eyes of another…to feel his own agony spread through them. He did not acknowledge the new ones that Maria manufactured now nearly on a daily basis. He refused to even see them. He trained them to hate and to think only of death. They were nothing more than pawns to him in a sadistic game of chess. They were kindling, weapons—something to fight with…and against. They died. He trained others. They lived and they would be rewarded.

He had become an empty being in a private world filled with the emotions of others…something that felt nothing and everything all at once. He had become the leader of the army of nightmares.

The humans that he would encounter in whatever herding ground they were fighting for would be filled with fear for their loved ones as they died. They would remind him of his mother's fleeting fear for her own monster son as he drank her blood and he hated himself, and every one of them. He drank from them until he was slow and stupid, and he prayed for the newborn that would notice his state and rebel against him. Not one of them ever did. They were all victims of instinct, and that instinct told them that rebellion against him would only lead to the fire. He was a legend among them.

Maria had broken his will, his spirit…his belief in good. By the time he came to know Peter, he had already murdered hundreds…By that time, he had no soul. He had killed so many…seen so much that he had never been meant to see…to _do_…that he knew there was no salvation for him.

There was nothing different about Peter in the beginning. He lasted longer than the others…showed more self control. He fought well, but he was still a pawn. It wasn't until Peter saw the tiny female marked for death that he began to stand out. The emotion that exuded from him was unrecognizable …unthinkable…the feeling was stronger than the desire for blood…strong enough to take his breath away. He realized that Peter would walk willingly into death in place of this woman. It puzzled him. Curiosity was the first emotion he had felt on his own in over fifty years.

He allowed himself a glance at the slight female, influenced by the strange emotion that Peter was still trying to hide from him, and she was suddenly beautiful to him where nothing had been beautiful before…a beauty that was ten times greater than Maria's because it was genuine. There was nothing behind her smile but that same strange emotion for Peter. He realized that he would not be able to kill her.

Images of what Maria would do to all three of them if she sensed weakness clouded his memory. He would live, of course. Maria could not discard a talent as valuable as his, but he would watch the other two die…watch that strange new emotion fade from their red eyes. He could not do that. He would not run the risk of losing the source of his strange awakening. He let them escape in the daylight. Maria raged for days.

But Peter and his silent partner had been just that…an awakening. A gunshot in the night that had alerted him to a new world. He found himself watching the newborns again, as he had so long ago. He let their emotions flow over him, and he recognized the agony below each one's thirst. He had felt that same pain long ago. Slowly, it dawned on him what he had become…what Maria's need for control had done to him and every newborn under him, and his desire for her slowly soured and turned to disgust.

He had already decided to leave her when Peter came for him again. He had been fighting the battle between his need to get away and her desire for him to stay for nearly five years when the calm white figure appeared in his quarters filled with unbelievable tales of his life in the north with the girl…his wife, Charlotte. He talked of five years of peace—of not one unnecessary death, and of other vampires who were not soldiers and who lived in quiet anonymity in the clouded cold of the mountains. They were things that he had never imagined possible, and he followed Peter northward with only a small glance back at the place of death that had served as his home for nearly sixty years.

It seemed stained in red…every last rooftop and tree, as if a cloud of blood had floated in as a warning to all who drew near. He turned toward the distant blue mountains. By the time night fell on them, he was in the company of his two new friends, marveling at how quickly the frantic desire had faded.

He stayed with Peter and Charlotte for three years, reveling in the whirl of strangely pleasant new emotions that their interactions brought to him, and he waited with a patience that could only come from one who had lived a century for the depression that had immobilized him in his days as a soldier to disappear completely, as it had for his companions.

But it did not fade, and the sense of hope that he had craved since he had first felt it that day on Maria's ranch remained nothing more than an echo reflected from the two of them…frustratingly out of his grasp. It drove him away for days on end, finally driving him away from them for good. The strength of the bond between the two lovers only made it more clear how sickly opposite his own life was. He had recognized the staggering difference between them on one of his dismal side trips. The battle was long gone…the number of victims he needed to keep the thirst away had decreased drastically, but the pain in the last thoughts of every one who died had not changed. He was still a monster to them. He felt that every time he took a life…drank with the self-loathing boiling inside him. It was something that neither Peter nor Charlotte could ever understand. Would it be the same for him until the end of time?

He wandered the dreary north states for some time, searching for a city where he could exist for a while into anonymity and finally settled on the booming industrial chaos of Philadelphia. He found sustenance in the crowded alleyways, and began to dream of a way to escape from the burden of the emotions of others…contemplating what exactly he would have to do to provoke the rage of the Volturi and end it all. His mind was filled with a thousand schemes when he ducked into a diner to avoid the rain, though why, he had no idea. The rain had never bothered him before. Perhaps he was further gone than he had suspected.

The scent of another vampire overwhelmed him, and his instincts should have taken over. The crowd in the diner should have been dead in seconds, and the other vampire lying in pieces.

But something froze him in his tracks…something that caused a fire to blaze in his eyes again for the first time since he was mortal...something that made everything inside him fall suddenly into place. It was a female—short and frail with the slightest hint of gold reflected in her otherwise dark red eyes. She left the stool where she was sitting and advanced quickly toward him. It was a movement that should have caused an attack reflex, but he was lost somehow in those strange dark eyes, and suddenly the light around him disappeared.

_You've kept me waiting a long time._

Her voice was confident and suddenly, the only thing in his world was her laughter as she took in his silence. He felt something come back to him in that moment—something that felt so unbelievably human that he was shocked into an apology. She laughed again, and it became the only music he could remember.

She held out her hand to him with a calm certainty, and suddenly…inexplicably, he took it…absorbed completely in her mysterious security, and marveling at the emotion that played at him like electricity. It was the hope that he had waited over a century to find. He was breathless as their eyes locked.

_I don't know you._

He did not understand, but he found he could not break contact with this tiny creature. She had the key to his future. She _was_ the key to his future. His life had changed completely in one moment.

_Not yet_. She gave him an intoxicating smile. _But you will_.

She pulled him towards the door. He followed, forgetting the pain in his throat and the memories that gnawed at his brain. He let her lead him and the awe that he felt for her echoed around the diner, causing every customer to stop and stare in wonder at the soldier and the beautiful girl beside him as they made their way out into the rain and into their brand new forever.

She turned toward him then, the gold in her eyes sparkling.

_How do you feel about mountain lions?_

_**Up next: Well, I forgot who the last Cullen was so I think I'll just end it here. ;) **_

_**(kidding! You can guess who's next!)**_


	22. The Final Layer

**I apologize profusely for the amount of time that I allowed to pass between these past two chapters! I have recently changed countries, continents, and languages as well as suffered yet a breakup that pretty much completely eliminated my desire to write. But yesterday as I was walking through the Parque Maria Luisa about a block away from my house in Sevilla, I came upon a statue of Dante...I stayed in the park until sundown writing.**

**I hope he didn't disappoint!**

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_There are no words to hide the shame that washes away the end of his tale and turns his eyes to deadly black…no penance in his mind great enough to atone for the lives lost in more than three generations of useless bloodshed. The shadows hide his face from human eyes, but mine see past them…past his mask of stone to share the isolation that his sins have brought and to enter once again the mind that closest resembles my own in surrender and in solitude._

_Six journeys into immortality. Six tales told and too many deaths to count among us all, six pairs of golden eyes all changed to black in memory and all fixed on me in both relief and horrid anticipation, understanding that their sins and secrets are light now in the air around us all, and mine hang like a yolk around my neck that binds me to the telling of the tale. It is a strange sort of claustrophobia that causes me to rise and seek out the arms of the only one who does not yet know the actions of the monster that she comforts so freely…the monster that I once allowed myself to become._

_My eyes scan the room from this idyllic location—from inside the embrace of the one that brings me peace—and find the Sister that was originally, impossibly destined for this position. Her thoughts play over the reasons why I have reserved for myself and not for her the deepest layer of Hell. I savor the guilt that taints the lining of each possibility appearing in her mind because we alone among all of our family have hunted humans out of pure revenge—have watched them live and laugh and love and taken pleasure in becoming their executioner in the end. _

_But the guilt that accompanies her reason now is only fleeting. The rage that defined her beginnings died long ago with the last of her five murderers My own guilt is a constant presence, and my own rage burns inside me still._

_There is movement in the air and my gaze falls again upon my battle scarred eldest Brother as he leaves the shadows to take the hand of his tiny savior. He glances darkly at me with the unwanted knowledge that he alone can see as I do the darkness that flutters like a parasite inside all men, feeding on desire and excreting temptation. We both have given in to that darkness… allowed it to rule us entirely and take away whatever semblance of a soul that is left to the immortal. But that darkness no longer has a permanent hold on the eternity that is left to him._

_It is the darkness that still threatens to take me, held at bay now only by the beings in this room, gathered around to hear of the time before its black talons had controlled me so completely._

_My entire body trembles now as I turn to my Father and no one else. His eyes alone project the past that I can no longer remember with clarity. It was only he who can recall the child I was when death made its decision to take me, and it is only he, with his centuries of religious fervor who understands my fate, and the ironically inevitable finale to this Divine Comedy. _

_Even if I am still in possession of a soul, I am damned. The only end to this tale can be Hell._

_The arms of my own personal angel tighten around me, keeping the flames at bay with the force behind her blood red eyes. Her lips seek mine and her breath become the sound of a zmooth breeze to smother the sounds of a Chicago that existed nearly a century ago in a past that I have never completely left behind. The rhythm brings me a certain peace as I disappear into my own long concealed history with my Father at my side to relive it with me as only he can truly do… _

Up Next: Wrath


	23. Wrath 1

**Once again later than I promised. Let's be honest...is it really a surprise anymore? I was sent to Italy for a week, and while that gets me no sympathy points, allow me to admit that all work and no play (no matter where in the world that work happens to be) makes wild spanish eyes late with her entries...sorry.**

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Their thoughts are a pallet of the pastel swirls of moments remembered in laughter, and the deep textured brushstrokes of the blood spilled in darkness. They've given their stories to me in senses and sentiment. They all remember in sight and sound…scent and emotion…reflex and temptation. _I _remember in music.

The first memories I have are of the smoothly playful tones of Mozart's seventh symphony accompanied by my mother's carefree laughter as I drifted between sleep and awake in a bedroom situated directly above her prized grand piano. I associated all of his overtures with her smiles, and his smoothly flowing sonatas took on the rhythm of my own over privileged life. I was her only son—born into a legacy. Music had been in my blood for generations. I was destined to be her prodigy.

Chicago was a bustling metropolis already in turn of the century standards when I came into the world. It was filled with a rhythm all its own and accompanied by the sweet harmony of the street side quartets that had become so popular in that era. The underlying pulse of poverty, hidden misery and constant injustice was barely a missed beat in the chorus of a song that marched ever closer to success at the expense of the working class, and yet the crime it created had surpassed the control of the small, corrupt band of officers that loosely called themselves a police force.

I was eight years old—an only child with a sister due in very little time when the crime of the city interrupted the dependable cadence of my private melody. It was raining, and I was completely absorbed in my own trivial complaints as I followed my mother to a conservatory that I hated with every last fiber of my being. I had procrastinated as much as I possibly could have that day, and we were late for the lesson, as we were every week, it seemed. This was a fact that I thoroughly enjoyed and claimed responsibility for with pride up until that day.

We had missed the car that my father had sent for us, and had been forced to walk the nearly two miles that separated our neighborhood from the cold brick building where I had been forced into an intimate relationship with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and so many others since before I could remember. My footsteps had taken on the qualities of a funeral march as I had imagined the look on my professor's face when my mother revealed that I had been feigning lack of ability in favor of a shorter practice time. She had slowed impatiently to wait for me, and I can still see the expectant glare she was giving me when the figure stepped ominously out of the shadows between us.

I have very little memory of what happened there on the street in the pleasant half light of late afternoon. The disadvantage of both mortality and youth has graciously blocked most of the attack from my mind. I only remember the sudden flash of metal in the shadow's hand and a dull jerk to the chest that sent a thrill of cold quickly down into my legs. The man did not speak. He did not demand money or valuables. There was nothing to alert us to the sudden gravity of the situation before I was on the ground facing a strange darkness that I had never before known existed, and listening with horror as the screaming began somewhere in the distance—high, clean and frighteningly beautiful like the perfect pitch of a well-played violin.

I turned toward the sound and found that I was face down on the pavement in a pool of something wet and warm that stung my eyes and tasted of metal. I watched from the corner of one strangely uncooperative eye as the man dragged my mother further into the shadows of the alleyway that he had emerged from. That one pure trilling note seemed to be coming from her. I wondered absurdly how so beautiful a sound could come from a face so distorted in terror.

Something inside of me…some protective instinct that played on only adrenaline caused my mind to register the man who carried her away, and I reacted with hatred, and a sudden movement toward her that must have caused incredible pain…and rendered my completely useless. A terrible blackness blossomed before my eyes and I remembered nothing more until much later when I awoke to a familiar soft voice explaining to my father that the knife had punctured my heart, but that I would live. Carlisle had been our family doctor for nearly a year at that point. I did not learn until much later that it was only because of his strange gifts that I had survived.

He reassured me that my mother was alive, but the tension behind his strange amber eyes revealed a secret worry that even at eight years old, he could not hide from me. I tore myself from my bed, and though he could have stopped me easily…and though he knew what would happen if my heart took on too much strain at that moment, he let me go. I found her, pale, thin, and bruised in the next room. My father had followed me in, and I turned to him now in fear and confusion.

The lines in his face described the loss that he had already suffered alongside of her. I had never seen my father so near to tears before that moment. I faltered and nearly fainted. His hand reached out to steady me, and we approached her bed together. There was no recognition in her eyes that revealed her notice of my flustered entry. There was no sign that she saw anything, and the doctor explained in his strange calm voice that she was sedated.

I was only a child at the time, and could not know the extent of what the attack had done to her. It wasn't until Carlisle's later memories inside my head painted a picture more graphic than I had ever wanted to imagine that I could fully appreciate the effort that he had expended that day to keep both of us alive. Had he not chosen to practice his medicine in Chicago at that time, all three of us would have died. No mortal doctor with the limited knowledge of medicine in those times would have been able to keep my heart beating, or to save my mother from bleeding to death after she had lost my sister and any hope of having another child. No one—mortal or immortal—could have saved the baby.

Neither one of us ever fully recovered. With my father at her side supporting her at every turn, my mother's physical wounds healed much sooner than any doctor could have predicted, but she was never the same again. In some way, she died that day in the street, and her music died with her. Her beloved piano became nothing more than a relic gathering dust in a room that no one entered. The cheerful movements of Beethoven and Mozart that had found their way into every corner of our home died away slowly. They were replaced by the sound of her cries in the night. Her tears became a dirge to sing me to sleep.

Her smile returned in time. Her husband and child were still the light of her life, and she could never deny them her smile, but it never reached her eyes. There was something silent deep inside them that remained buried until her death nine years later…a secret pain that I thought I understood even at the age of eight years old. She blamed herself for everything.

It was that pain, so poorly hidden behind deep green eyes that burned within me every day of my short life. It outlasted the cold shock of their deaths in the epidemic, and the agony of my own transformation. It took the form of a nearly uncontrollable rage that ate at me and marked my entire existence. My mother had carried a burden that was never hers to bear, but what she never knew was that she did not carry it alone. It was my fault that we were late that day. It was my fault that my mother was beaten and my sister was murdered before she had even been born, and I have shouldered full responsibility for what happened to my family for one hundred years.

I placed the face of our attacker on every enemy that I encountered from that point on, and I was forever searching the eyes of the men around me, imagining the murder that I had seen in those of our attacker…projecting my hate for him into every aspect of my life. He was never found…not then.

The attacker's knife had pierced my heart, significantly weakening it and transforming speed and agility from the inborn instinct of a healthy boy to nearly an impossible dream. In the weeks and months following the attack I was to discover just how lasting the effects of my wounds would be. It seemed that overexertion caused me to grow weak. I was brought, unconscious to Carlisle's consult countless times by my friends and teachers.

I was an active child, and my hatred of this weakness soon boiled into an anger for the doctor whom I saw so often whenever my refusal to adhere to his restrictions forced another visit. He made it strangely difficult to hate him. There was always a strange look of anguish in his eyes as he told me that my heart would not endure the strain that I placed upon it so carelessly. At my desperate request, however, he never told my mother. During the next nine years, she only knew of two occasions where I unconsciousness had overtaken me, and both times, Carlisle had graciously created an excuse that pointed far away from my weakened heart. He seemed to understand the guilt that my mother would shoulder for my condition, and he nobly kept my secret.

It was not until much later that I would discover just how many secrets that Carlisle had kept for my family.

Up next: more secrets and more Wrath...


	24. Wrath 2

**A special thanks to _shetalkstoangels_, who plays a thousand instruments and knows a million little things about every type of music that you can imagine. Hope I didn't screw it all up too bad!**

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I was dying.

Carlisle knew this. He had known from the moment he had sensed my blood spilled on the clothing of the man who had brought me in his arms to the hospital. It was life's blood…the scent of the dying and the already dead. He had managed to slow the process—to stretch the end of my life into years instead of moments, but in the end, my heart was irrevocably damaged. It would bear the strain placed upon it by a child, of course, but only Carlisle understood that it could not possibly carry me into manhood. I would die a child. He had known this from the time I was eight years old.

_I _discovered it at the age of fourteen.

My talent for reading people, and subsequently the ability to hear people's thoughts came from my mother. She had a remarkable instinct when it came to people. She knew the good and bad inside a person's soul. She also knew that Carlisle was something more than just a man. She saw the darkness in him, and it frightened her, but she also saw the compassion and the knowledge that was impossible to disguise. It was this instinct, and this knowledge that she passed on to me, and it was this talent that had made me aware of the second secret that Carlisle had kept.

My abilities were not extrasensory at the time…only a talent for reading expressions and reactions. It was the finality in his eyes every time that I awoke in his office. It was the sadness in his voice as he spoke with me about my future, and it was the pain and shock in his impossibly black eyes the day I asked him if he had known from the beginning that I was going to die. Carlisle has never once lied to me in my one hundred years in his company. His answer that day was a simple and sad yes.

I had suspected but never been certain until that moment. It should have affected me more than it did. It should have stopped my world in it tracks, but youth bears an immortality of its own that disappears very slowly. I did not understand the possibility of death at that time, even with it creeping up behind me at an ever faster pace. An adolescent is never truly mortal. In a way, I could say that I have never understood impending death. Not in _my_ mind. Not until a mortal girl a century later showed me how easy it was to find and how difficult to avoid.

My discovery only fed my rage, of course. The ripples of a crime committed years ago were still scarred across the face of my mother when she thought that no one was looking. I was the only person who could steal that darkness when it appeared, making her music my own and replacing memories with a substitute sonata. She seemed to only live again when her son was playing for her. My death would put an end to the music. My death would kill her as well. In the end, time would succeed where our attacker had not.

A secret, silent rhapsody began to intertwine itself into my life, continuing slowly, darkly but waiting there behind the chords to explode and to transform into a fugue. I searched constantly for an opportunity to unleash the anger in my life—to project the pain in my mother's eyes and in my dying heart onto something else. The first Great War became that opportunity.

I was too young to join the war when a simple assassination called all of Europe to attention, just as I was too young when America was finally pulled into the fray, but I saw in the life of a soldier a perfection that I couldn't have invented in a lifetime of imagining. It was an opportunity to break free—to escape the silent guilt that forever bound me to my mother's torture and begin my life anew in a place where not even the language could call back memories. It was a chance to place the attacker's face on every enemy…to turn guilt and fury into courage and glory.

And if I died at the front, could it even be considered a loss? How much more did I have to live anyway?

I tried to convince my mother to let me enlist at the age of seventeen. I tried to convince Carlisle to falsify a birth certificate that would allow me to be eligible for the draft that would take me anyway at the age of eighteen—if my heart held out that long. They were both adamantly against it, and so my seventeenth birthday found me still in my home…still battling the shadows with Beethoven instead of the gun that I would have so eagerly taken up at that time, and realizing with building anger that my heart would most likely not last another year.

I had no idea at the time that my fate, and that of my entire family—of millions of people for that matter—had already been decided by something much more effective and much less strategic than World War One.

September found the nation already in a state of panic, and Chicago's hospitals full to the point of bursting. The flu took them quickly, sometimes only a day after they began to feel the symptoms. It did not follow any pattern, as viruses tend to do. It attacked the young and the healthy, and the weak were spared. It took weeks to wear some down, while others died in hours. The Spanish Flu was not the virus that is portrayed today in every film about epidemics. The victims did not die peacefully in a fevered sleep. They died fighting and screaming, bleeding from their ears and vomiting, drowning in their own bodily fluids.

That is how my father died. Fighting…bleeding…dying like the hundreds around him. I played Bach that night for my mother as she cried herself to sleep.

I had advanced to Chopin two weeks later when my mother began to cough. She had been sitting by my side, somehow already smaller…more frail, and yet she struggled against me when I lifted her into my arms. We were already well on the way to the hospital when her strength failed and she stopped struggling. I ran with her as fast as my failing heart would allow me, growing dizzier by the moment, and praying that I would make it to the hospital before unconsciousness overtook me. It was in sight, only meters away when my vision finally failed. I collapsed there with my mother in my arms. It was Carlisle, on his way home after nearly forty hours in the hospital, who found us both.

An angry voice insisting that someone return to their bed woke me much later, and I opened my eyes to my mother's alarmingly flustered face. A nervous smile lighted her bright green eyes as I recognized her—the last smile I ever remember from her. I tried to rise then…to explain that I was fine and to make her go back to her bed, but a wave of dizziness overtook me, and I noticed a weight in my chest that had not been there on our panicked journey to the hospital. Did I have the flu now? The dizziness grew. Black spots appeared in front of my eyes and I tried to speak, but my lungs seemed to be full of sand…water…blood. My mind filled with memories of my father's death, and my last thought before fading strangely back into oblivion was that I couldn't die like this…not in front of my mother.

The last sound I heard was her cries for me to stay with her. They seemed broken...wet somehow.

I awoke in a delirium much later to serve as a witness to her last request. I was too far gone by then to understand what was happening. Her voice was distant and weak—a dream in my delusion, and it wasn't until I saw Carlisle's wildly confused expression as he pushed her from the room that I realized that my mother was gone as well. There was no force left in me to mourn her passing.

The next conscious memory I have is of a cool night wind on my fevered skin. And burning alive. I will never forget burning alive.

I won't explain the pain again. I've described it six times over…_relived_ it, and that is enough. It lasted longer for me. I was the first. It took four days to change me, though the venom began to spread much faster once my heart had been repaired. My heart worked well for one full day, pumping fire through my veins, before it stopped for good.

I knew what I was…what Carlisle had made me long before the pain had gone away. I had been suffering for less than two days when I began to hear the voices…Carlisle's from my side, and another slur of hundreds that passed and quickly disappeared—voices from outside the darkness of the tiny room where I was slowly changing. They cried and ranted. They questioned and sang. They came to me in pictures and sounds and scents and emotions that stole away my senses and made me certain that I was falling into the seventh level of Hell. The voices and the burning.

It was Carlisle's voice that I clung to. It came to me twice…sound and mind, though I didn't understand that at the time. It described in words what I saw in pictures and felt in memory. It took away the horror of what had happened to my family…the fear of what I was becoming, and it whispered promises of an immortality that I had never known and a speed that had never been possible in my life half lived. I tried to respond when the pain allowed me, but I could not distinguish between speech and thought, or between the images in Carlisle's head and those in the streets around us. But my answers had been enough to alert Carlisle. He recognized my talent as something similar to that of his ancient tutor, Aro.

The pain had gone after the fourth day, just as Carlisle had promised, but the voices in my head had not. They filled me with a new burning…a taste that I wanted more than anything in the world. I rose with the scent on my tongue. Carlisle was there in an instant to stop me. His voice was inside of my head, a scream and a whisper at once. An order and a request. He held me there with only his mind. His strength would do nothing against my own. He knew this well.

But his mind could not fight the thoughts of a thousand for long. They screamed at me in images and senseless runs of emotion that punched and poked and pushed at every last piece of the little control that was left to me. It was claustrophobia and agoraphobia at once. It was the greatest hate and the strongest love…burning desire and revulsion. It was every thought in a three mile radius transmitting directly into the mind of a newborn vampire.

And the hospital was only two miles away. The flu, the sea of dying humans…and the _blood_.

**Up Next: Stay tuned for more undercover action from the Seventh layer of Hell!**


	25. Wrath 3

**I tried and tried, but I just couldn't fit Edward into only three entries. It seems that I'm going for four...sorry! Hey, even SM admitted that Edward overthought everything so it seems only fair that his story should be the longest, right? **

**Now that I've got a little more done on this chapter, maybe my brain will let me work on my Spanish lit midterm that is due tomorrow (and that I haven't even started...damn you Twilight!)**

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It was my mother in the end who stopped me from becoming the next pandemic in that section of Chicago…or Carlisle's visions of her projected with as much force as he could into my head. He showed me the expression on her dying face as she had given him her last request. I had been awake for the words. I had heard them leave her mouth in small choked gasps, but I had not seen the conviction in her eyes…the knowledge there. In those moments teetering precariously between life and death, she had somehow discovered certain partial truths behind Carlisle's well hidden struggle. She had known the dangers behind what she was asking of him, and she had understood in that moment exactly the sentence she was inflicting on her son. She had known that I would suffer—that I would create suffering.

And still, she had pleaded for my immortality.

The image resonated in my head, the conflict stopping my feet…stopping my breath, and clearing my mind for the first time in several days. The voices melted graciously into the background, but the anger that flooded the silent spaces was a poor substitute. I had to to get away…from the voices…from the blood…from my mother laying cold in the hospital morgue charged with the responsibility of those I would kill—those I so desperately wanted to drink from at this very moment. I could not send her into her afterlife with any more burden than she had already carried.

Carlisle did not hesitate. He did not question. He simply left everything behind and started again with his new monster son. We left Chicago that night. We took nothing with us of our previous lives and we started north without conversation or warning. My first year and a half as a vampire was passed in a transient state, sleeping in the dirt far away from the presence of humans and lurking in the shadows to prey on the bitter blood of deer and wolves. Carlisle's first year as my father was marred by complete silence as I battled the rapidly changing emotions that were a result of being changed in the height of adolescence. I fought endlessly with the decision to leave my patient guide and give in to the scent that had become a constant call in my life.

I will not say how many travelers died mysteriously during those months when my control did not exist, and I will not describe the pain and disappointment in Carlisle's expression each time he discerned the different shade of red that darkened my eyes after every mistake, or the desperation in his voice as he watched me inevitably close in on whatever human had been unlucky enough to find his way into my path of scent that day. That memory…that scalding hurt in my father's eyes is mine alone to remember just as the confused and horrified last thoughts of those first innocent victims are mine alone to carry every day of this twisted journey.

He struggled alongside them. He died with each one…and yet he forgave me every time.

I listened to Carlisle's thoughts…his memories…centuries of history confined to one mind, and a thousand inner conflicts trivialized and placed lovingly behind my own petty struggles. Those months must have been an enormous sacrifice to him, knowing that the flu was still raging around him…smelling the death in every town and knowing how many lives he could have saved without me by his side. Forgoing shelter, convenience, and any human contact for as long as I desired, and still remaining with me, suffering in the silence that I demanded and praying that my final decision would be the correct one. The heat of the rage inside me was slowly smothered by his genuine honesty and impossible tolerance.

By the time our wanderings had led us to the tiny town of Ashland, he had become my Father—and I had become Edward Cullen.

It was there in Ashland where he would find the only thing missing in his long existence, and I would find the Mother to complete our strange new coven and create in its place, a family. I was not with him when he discovered her, broken and so close to death that the humans had already given her that label, but I saw the change in his mind before he felt it himself. I felt our entire world change, and all of his thoughts merge with hers as she became one of us.

Her turning was three days of unexpected agony for me just as much as it was for her. It brought back memories of my own death…of the deaths of all of those who I had killed without wanting to in my two years of immortality, and strangely, of my mother's tortured face as the man had dragged her into the alley so many years ago.

What emerged from the room to comfort me where I lay curled in a corner still attempting to assemble the dismal pieces of her human life was the most beautiful creature that I had ever seen with the most loving mind that I had ever heard. The immediate unquestioning acceptance washed away all of the pain that her transformation had created, and my heart seemed to beat again with the same strange desire to love her as she loved me. She was my Mother from that first frighteningly strong encounter.

Still, it was torture to be near her, struggling as she was with her own desire and her own past. I watched her play with her infant son a million times over in her mind, and sing him to sleep…a sweet nocturne that reminded me somehow of the wind. I saw his lips turn from a delicious rosy flush to a cold dead blue before her eyes and felt her anguish over and over again, and so it was with relief that I accompanied Carlisle and her to the cabin where his tiny body lay to finally close the last chapter of her human life.

What happened there at her canyon where her mortal son was finally laid to rest became the first event in an unstoppable chain that would later drive me to serial murder, and ultimately end in a blood soaked New York alley with the condemnation to Hell of every soul present.

I heard his thoughts…the deplorable animal that had called himself her husband. I saw in his eyes all of the beatings that she had suffered during her time with him, and it took everything I had inside of me to respect my new mother's wishes and to allow him to leave alive. In the end, it was the awe that I harbored for her…her ability to carry those memories inside her and to forgive, that shocked me into submission, and my respect for her began to rival my respect for her love struck husband.

She showed me music again, and it sounded as it never had before…in everything around me. A trilling percussion in a flame...a run of fluid woodwinds in the flowing of a river. Her song was the wind—complex and mysterious and always calling to her. I found my new abilities to be graciously helpful in creating a song worthy of her, and she listened to it always with the greatest admiration—eyes closed and remembering the careless moments of her childhood. It brought a much needed peace to all of our lives.

But the look in her eyes as she had spoken her final words to her human husband never left my memory. For the first few years, I could not understand why it continued to haunt me. Then one day, nearly ten years after my turning, my song to her ended and her eyes suddenly filled again with that painful expression, and I recognized it at last—the expression that my mother had worn every day of her short life. The weight of the world in the blink of an eye.

For years, I had replaced the face Esme's husband with the long forgotten visage of my childhood attacker without even knowing it, and her inexplicable forgiveness had tied my thoughts to my human mother. I realized then that I had never really known what had happened that day so long ago, and that only my new father could give me the details that would allow me to turn the page on my own human life. I asked him that night when he returned from the hospital.

And discovered the third, and gravest, secret that Carlisle had kept from me that day so very long ago…

Nearly ten years of living with a mind-reader had strengthened his ability to hide certain thoughts, but what flashed in his mind in the moment that I finally mentioned my mother after years of avoidance could not have been contained any longer. It came at me in an explosive splash, like blood from a severed artery—too much spilled before the flood could be contained. The torture of it brought me instantly to my knees.

I saw myself as a child, bleeding and delirious, rambling desperately to no one in particular about the man who had taken my mother. I felt the thirst, so well contained deep inside of Carlisle as he stood over my open chest and struggled to keep the blood pumping through my tiny exposed heart as others around him watched in frozen awe. I saw him leave me alive, and set out in a frustrated fury from the hospital…smelling, sniffing the air. I saw the sun set and rise. I felt the desperation rise inside of him as the sun set and rose again. Three days.

And then my skin began to boil as an image of my mother crashed into my head and destroyed the self control that I had slowly gained through eight long years of suffering. She was lying on a bed, beaten and bound...dress torn to shreds and unconscious No other faces flowed in around hers. Carlisle had found her alone and carried her back to the hospital.

My mind turned to shadow then, and blocked out anything more than a slur of words as I struggled with the strength to rise from my position on the floor.

…_lost the child…kidnapped…her son…she'll live…tortured…_

It was the last word that pushed my mother's pained expression into its proper place and banished every other rational thought from my mind.

Three days.

I had been unconscious for three days while my mother had been held captive and tortured. I had tried to decipher the expression in her eyes my entire childhood. I had hated her for that look and for the guilt that it created. My human father had known…my new father had known, and I had been left in the dark my entire mortal life! I found that I was on my feet then, and headed toward the door.

Carlisle gave me one last image as I pushed past him—could it have been justification for his years of silence? It was my mother, bruised and empty already, the two of them alone in the room. She was looking at him with dark determination.

_He can't know. Edward can never know_.

Esme was calling out to me, and Carlisle was moving to stop me, but my mind was no longer with them in our home—no longer with them in that time frame. I was eight years old again, rushing into my mother's hospital room and finding her closed, distant…dead. I was a vampire with a photographic memory, malicious strength, and a volatile temper heading home to Chicago once again. I was Edward Masen.

I was Wrath.

And they would all pay now.

_Up next: I seem to be enjoying wrath, so why the hell not? I'm going with more wrath!_


	26. Wrath 4

**I want to thank all of you who have been so faithful in reading and leaving reviews...and those of you with impossible patience who can bear those three to four week waits as well (sorry!) Really, you guys are the reason why I will very soon be able to say that i actually finished my first fan fic.**

**Not yet though! Dante allows for repentance and redemption, and so I think I will too. Hey, I 've got to try for some sort of happy ending, right?**

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If there had been hate music at that time—electric guitars screaming through a furious barrage of drums and humans shrieking their anger in unintelligible rifts, placing every emotion they have into one single chorus—it would have been the music that defined my existence in those dark moments. As it was, the night was filled with an ominous silence…an absence of collective thoughts and supplications. A silence even from my own incessant conscience. I have never again experienced such a complete lack of senses. It lasted two days—long enough to carry me home.

I arrived in Chicago drowned in obscurity. Revenge had bled into my eyes, leaving them black as night and freezing the memory of my mother's scent on the wind in every immortal detail exactly as Carlisle had remembered it nearly twenty years ago. I followed that memory into a decaying slum that seemed not to have changed in nearly two decades to a place where her imagined scent mixed disconsolately with the sour stench of human waste and home stilled alcohol. I hated every odor, and every slurred image that was flung at me from the vagrants occupying every corner of the house that had been my mother's cell.

I found nothing, of course—nothing to fuel the flames that had devoured eight years of self control and carried me to this black hole in humanity. It was there where I could have let it all end. It was there, climbing the soiled staircase, that my path should have led me away from the place in Hell that I have since secured. It was there, staring at a broken bed that could not possibly have held my human mother that the strange silence ended, and the thoughts of another determined my destiny.

They emanated from a shadow in the corner where the scent of waste was stronger, and they were directed at me.

…_slit his throat before he even knows what's happening…_

The flow of blood in his mind caught my immediate attention. His fascination rivaled my own_._

_Look at his jacket. He's got money. Not like that last one. All show, she was, and not worth the slip of my knife. _

I stiffened then. He was remembering the texture of the blood on the blade…the thickness of it on his fingers as he wiped it away…

_Acted too fast. Should have taken something else from that one_…

And the image that accompanied his thought sent fresh rage screaming up my spine. There was no question of control. It was shockingly easy to take his life—amazingly satisfying to watch in the shards of a broken mirror as threads of scarlet crept into irises that had been gold for over seven years. His last murderous thoughts had crushed the disappointed faces of my new mother and father, and the warmth…the freedom…the indeterminable _power_ of human blood coating a throat that had burned for far too long took away every last objection that I could have ever conjured.

My fate was sealed in the span of a human breath. That was all that it took me to drain him entirely.

The sweet oblivion that humans find in chemicals…the momentary high that brings them as close to immortality as they will ever know…the pull to inhale powders, or inject plant residues…the need to do whatever it takes to return to the place where their mind and body have moved into a higher plain...nothing that can be created or described by humans is comparable to the desire for their blood, and no physical pain or insignificant symptom of drug withdrawal can ever rival the torture of abstaining after that first glorious taste.

I recognized the addiction—my predatory instincts surfacing, and I attempted at first to quell the thirst with animal blood again, but it tasted like ash in my mouth. Justification for my crimes came so easily to my mind when their blood was flowing past my lips, turning to venom and fortifying a monster. Pictures painted red in the blood of their victims fueled a furor that I had harbored since my mortal childhood. It gave me pleasure to watch those thoughts blur and finally fade away with their wasted lives. Days stretched into months…stretched into years, and it all became a game…a hunt. I was a predator of predators.

The images of my human mother did not fade, nor did my desire to avenge her, but I pushed everything about her to the back of my mind, unable to confront the fact that I had long ago ceased to be the son that she had held so deeply in her heart. I had become a demon, incapable of remorse or clemency and equally undeserving of either. I had forgone salvation—mortal and immortal alike—and ceded to the scarlet heat of my own private hatred. It haunted me in the daylight, eating at the little conscience that remained, but at night…with the blood of other monsters coursing through my veins…

And so when a sickly familiar image appeared in the mind of a murderer that could not possibly have been old enough to have perpetrated a crime over twenty years before, I very nearly killed him without a second glance. It was the intensity of the memory as it appeared in his mind that stopped me. His last terrified thoughts were of his father.

The creatures that I had removed from this earth before had all been too far gone to remember family. Their final thoughts had been of victims—of the regret of murders planned and not performed but this one was different. A flood of brutal beatings washed into my mind, all given to this man by the father that appeared in his head. My hatred flamed and then exploded as I recognized the face in his memory—as I placed it in its rightful position behind the knife that had been plunged into my eight year old heart. The son had followed in his father's footsteps.

The images faded with the son's heartbeat, but it had been enough time to discern one defining fact.

_New York_.

The father. The torturer. The murderer. The instigator of all of my fury was in New York.

Before the sun set the next night, so was I.

I found in New York an infestation of evil. I discovered a new type of criminal crouching in innumerable alleyways—the kind that stalked their prey not unlike me. Their blood was bitter—closer to that of an animal than a human, and the violence that spattered their thoughts had the power to paralyze. Their memories brought pain to the feast. I hated them, and every moment passed observing them from the shadows, but these ones, just like vampires, traveled in covens, and I needed information on one member in particular.

I listened to their minds for as long as I could stand. I hunted them as they hunted innocents, and I took them as they pounced. My mind formed around theirs. I began to understand their reasoning and to predict their movements. They weren't so far off from my own kind…their fascination with the fragileness of human bodies and their supernatural need for blood made them nearly a missing link between vampires and mortals. Still, their fantasies sickened me, and it was with relief that I ended their lives. They were never careful. They were never merciful.

Neither was I.

It was listening to the last thoughts of human animals that I began to realize exactly how far from humanity I had travelled. The triumph that had accompanied each new kill had long ago begun to fade, and I began to contemplate the possibility of leaving it all again—returning to the home that I had left. The thought of the pain in the expressions of both Carlisle and Esme drove the thought from my mind, and of course…the blood from the next kill obliterated the idea entirely.

I lived inside the malicious calculations of serial murderers for over a year before I saw even the slightest rumor of the monster that I sought so intently. When his image finally appeared, it was not in the mind of a murderer, but in the frightened musings of a very unfortunate petty thief.

The drunken, half laughed tale of my childhood demon's opulent affairs in his native Chicago flooded my reality, and I followed the image without a second thought. I lost track of which direction the thief was headed or how much time had passed. I was adrift on a sea of memory, and by the time the memory turned to the nightmare that I had been waiting for, that sea had filled with fire.

The man was a thief, nothing more, but I was far from distinguishing good and bad ny the time the memory had ended. I allowed my rage to blind me…allowed the basest of instincts to take over completely. I did not look around until the screaming both outside and inside of my head had ceased. It was only then that I realized what I had done.

I held in my hands, not the corpse of a broken thief who had served as witness to the confessions of my attacker, but the pale fragile frame of a child—his child. Another lay at my feet, shielded partially by the broken body of the mother. I had followed the man into his home without knowing, and I had exacted a judgment not only on him, but on his entire family as well. I had finally gone full circle. I had become a killer of innocents.

I was one of them now, and I realized then that I could not stop on my own.

With a child's blood still warm in my throat, I made my way into a portion of my past—a telegraph stop. When I had left Ashland, we had not been in possession of a telephone, and so I did the only thing that I could think of…I sent a telegraph. The message was simple:

_New York City. Help me. _

I had no way of knowing if the message would arrive, or even if my two immortal parents had moved on. By the next night, however, I had ceased to care. Bloodlust had occupied all of my thoughts again and brought another monster to my attention.

I maintained my distance from this one, not wanting to make any more errors that ended in the death of more innocents. I flitted on the border where his gruesome thoughts were a distant echo, and quietly fought the desire to kill him slowly.

Suddenly, two shouted thoughts hit me at once—a double impact that threw me to the ground in pain and surprise. One was beautiful and infected with maternal worry.

_Edward! I'm here!_

And one pulled violently at me from the deepest regions of my own dark past. My human mother, tied…screaming…bleeding.

_It was him!_

Her scent came to me then as she drew closer, calling to mind pleasant lazy afternoons and midday hunts. My immortal mother, distraught…searching…tasting the air around her.

_No, Esme! Not yet! _

I closed the distance between me and the man I had been looking for in one beat of his vicious heart. His face came into view at the end of a closed alley…the face that I had remembered every day now for over a quarter of a century. Shock froze in the lines around his eyes as he took in my form and his slow mortal mind wrapped around the fate that awaited him. He saw a demon straight out of Hell.

So did I.

_Edward! Stop! Now!_

Esme was in the alley then too. She moved swiftly—unwisely—into position between me and my final victim. Her large golden eyes sought frantically in my crimson ones for some recognition. Her voice was calm—loving. How could she stare into my eyes and still feel love?

_This is the last, Esme! _

She smiled complacently at me. Her voice was deadly calm. The monster's heart beat a tantalizing tune into the background.

_No. No more death._

_He's the one! He stabbed me! He tortured my mother!_

The smile washed from her face and appeared as recollection on the man behind her. It took the form of a great, satisfied sneer, and I was suddenly assaulted on all sides by images of pleading, and screaming…of my mother writhing and the sunlight reflected in the pool of blood that was growing around her tiny son…of other women, dead and staring up at him…of pale, still children with clouds in their eyes. It was too much. I fell to my knees in pain.

Esme took me in her arms, her gaze shifting frantically from her monster son to the creature in the corner of the alley.

_Edward?_

_Children!_ My teeth were clenched against the barrage of images. The words came in slow screaming syllables. _Can't you smell the blood on his hands?_

And she did smell it. I felt the heat of her rage as it surged inside of her, and I prepared myself to pounce the second that it had burned away her objection, but nothing could have prepared me for her reaction.

The strength of her thoughts in that moment pushed the images of the past out of my mind forever.

_Your blood won't stain his soul! Not my son! Never again!_

And before my eyes could even follow her path, she was balanced over him, her teeth sunk deeply into his neck and her eyes filling with blood and gold. There was an icy smile on her face as she felt his heartbeat slow to a stop—a smile that chilled me more than anything ever had. I had travelled far into the realm of the psychotic, and she had followed me down. She had pushed past the brink of her own sanity to bring back her fallen son.

She stared at me then, from her position above her first and only victim and held out her hand to her only son.

_Let's go home_.

The blood on her lips was painful. The blood in her eyes was agony. I took her outstretched hand, humbled and terrified, and followed her out into the moonlight.

Her eyes were gold again by the time we reached the Wisconsin border. The blood in my eyes took much longer to fade.

The memory of her predatory smile in the darkness never will.

_Up Next: Repentance_


	27. Absolution

**I'm afraid to write this chapter note because really an apology is not enough to make up for two months without writing. I suppose you all understand about the end of the semester rush. In my defense, I also switched countries again and wrote 8 versions of this before I was satisfied.**

**OK, so maybe I'm just not ready for it to end...**

* * *

_A half breath drawn and not released._

_Hands clenched into fists and eyes closed in contrition._

_The tale ends in scathing silence as I read the thoughts of my family around me—observing her reaction through their eyes and not my own. All of their memories…all their thoughts and pain and apprehensive expectations descend upon her in a massive wave. I watch in third person as she stands strong against the agony of over one thousand years of anguish, war, murder, and suicide lived cumulatively by those that she chose to love from the beginning without fully understanding the sacrifices to her own morality that that love would entail._

_Her face is carved in marble…expressionless and painfully unreadable through any of the eyes that scrutinize every possible tremble of her lips. Confusion colors the thoughts all around me excepting the silence that blackens her position in the room. The desire to escape is prominent in each mind, but they remain, held in a strange form of suspended animation by their own insurmountable curiosity. Will their crimes outweigh her ability to forgive?_

_They wait, and I wait with them, pendant upon the thoughts of another for the first time in over a century…waiting for the judgment of the only one among us who was born into immortality by choice. The only one who fell into undeath without a struggle. The only one who has never— not as human or as vampire— taken a life, and the only one among us who chose her journey into death to create another life._

_Her breath catches, forcing my eyes to open once again…to search hers out and find her reaction somewhere within. They are frozen on me, still lost in seven pasts…still searching the tale for redemption. As I watch, unable to give her a happy ending, she lets them flutter closed for a moment or an eternity._

_When she opens them again, her eyes are black…emotionless and unseeing. Dead. Too close to the expression that she wore on her face in Jacob's memories the night that the wolves found her lost in the woods…the night that I had walked away from her. I allow the pain of that memory to wash over me. It seems like preparation for a tsunami yet to come._

_Her lips are still and steady as she stares at me…at nothing. Her slow, decisive exhale of breath becomes the only sound in the room as her gaze falls painfully away from my own and down to the child asleep in her arms._

_And then she turns away from me…away from us all._

_Rejection sinks searing fangs into my skin and turns blood and venom alike to ice in the half a second that it takes her to cross the room and place our daughter in my sister's cold hands. It is a scene that I have imagined a thousand times…a million perhaps since the reluctant realization that I cannot live without her, and yet somehow, my most vivid imaginings have never touched upon the pain of watching her walking away. My eyes close against it, but the reflection of her dismissal crashes into the minds of my family. The pain immobilizes me as seven creatures so completely accustomed to apathy and isolation slowly realize just how much of themselves is walking out the door with her._

_One moment of pain like I have never felt in my century of life. Only one moment of the seven months that I once gave her, and then her path veers from the cold solitude of the Washington night that had never truly been her destination. She turns instead to face us all, cleverly blocking the only door and the only escape from the verdict that waits behind ominous eyes._

_Carlisle's thoughts fill with the memory of centuries of penances imagined and never given, and it is to him the she turns first, with a compassionate reassurance that only he has ever been able to replicate. My mind plays over so many times that his children have come to him seeking advice…seeking forgiveness or understanding that could only have significance coming from him. Now we all watch in stunned silence as our chosen confessor looks toward his for his own absolution._

_No words are spoken. None are needed. Her reverence is written into her expression and his flows freely and silently through my mind. He's wandered far and wide in search of some reason for it all…a scientific explanation for our existence and even a spiritual one. He's traveled around the world, witnessed every culture from the shadows and heard the good and evil musings of men in a thousand languages. He discovered something good inside of each of us…something unique, but he never found a selflessness and a love of the humanity to rival his own until I brought Bella into his life._

_His expression is one of relief as he takes the hand of my mother, and she turns not to him, but toward the blood red eyes of her new daughter that hold inside their judgment of her sins next. Those eyes are unreservedly accepting and brimmed with adoration as they move smoothly from Esme to our own daughter and back again, admiring the three generations that had not existed a year ago, and mirroring the thoughts that dance from my mother's heart into my mind._

_She sees in Bella the missing piece…the child who brought the music back into her first immortal son's life, and another mother who gave her life and her soul for her child. The one who has taken away the last pieces of darkness in her strange, reconstructed family. The room becomes still as we contemplate the bond between the only two among us who understand the creation of life—two immortal mothers eternally connected by that miracle…one who gave everything to recreate a family, and another who gave everything to complete it._

_The moment passes and the attention shifts to the heartbeat of a sleeping child and to the beautiful murderer who cradles her in cold arms. Rosalie's eyes are detached, awaiting the penalty for both the sins that she has committed and those committed against her, from a sister who very nearly suffered the same fate. Bella's expression reflects the gravity of that possibility as she stares austerely into eyes that are still poisoned by the past. The words exchanged in the silent exchange could fill a thousand novels. In it is the heat of unconditional trust—the faith that is proven by the gift of something as precious as her only daughter. It melts the ice in my sister's eyes, and washes the poison away as her thoughts mix with my daughter's innocent dreams. I see Bella in both of them…_

_In Rosalie's mind she sees a challenge—a contradiction to the reality that she has so carefully constructed out of her own memories. A break in her beliefs that shows the benefits of eternity and forces a different outlook on immortality. She sees a girl who gave up everything to be one of us, and someone who brought life into a place that she was convinced could hold nothing more than death. My first sister--the vampire who refuses to look outside her own darkness—who sees color only in her lover's arms and her mortal childhood, has finally found beauty in immortality through the eyes of a newborn…and that newborn's baby girl._

_Her eyes leave sister and child and move to the one who hovers behind them. He has risen in anticipation of his judgment, and for the first time in his long life, Emmett's eyes are dull, fearful. They cannot seem to meet her gaze. Shame is unnatural for him—maddening—and he rejects it, starting forward to meet her with his mind throwing anxiety in my direction. She has become his favorite playmate…someone who is compensating for years of limitation and who now revels as much as him in speed and power._

_The look she shoots at him from across the room stops him in his tracks before he can reach her. Her face is marred by the conflict of two struggling emotions —severe and concerned as half of her tries to reach out to him and take away the anxiety that is so alien in his mischievous eyes, and half of her dares him to ruin this moment. He recognizes the challenge in her eyes and the fear in his own evaporates, backing away calmly. The smirk that appears on his face marking a duel to be played at a later date—in the sunlight when death is further behind them both. He glances over at me in approval of my choice—a fragile creature that had once been unable to function without injury has become his newest rival. The girl that for him had once been my little human toy has managed to show him humility._

_It is his humility that appears on her face as she turns toward the shadows, following Jasper into the corner where he has taken refuge by the window. A knowing smile twitches on her lips as she recognizes his eternal search for an escape—still the victim of instincts that she finally understands. Those instincts overwhelm him as the severity of her gaze traps him where he stands. A thousand strategies burst into his mind--violence, panic, aversion, escape…anything to avoid her judgment. All are slowly conquered by the unspoken exoneration in that he finds in her eyes and breaths in from the air around him. Her death, over thousands of others, has taught him that instincts can be overcome._

_Liberation tints the air and reverberates through the room. It fills us all with his hope and her happiness, and it carries his thoughts to me on a wave of serenity that calms me in spite of seven deaths relived. He has found in her a constant fount of peace and security. Her emotions are a haven from centuries of temptation suffered by others and he finds himself reluctantly surrendering to the contagious security of a life shared and ended exactly how she had chosen without any regrets._

_To her clairvoyant sister next, who observes with a smug omniscience that which had only moments ago been stained with worry and doubt. She is there with her arms around her sister before she can even turn; relishing the fact that she still has the ability to surprise a vampire. Their smiles battle for brilliance. There is nothing to forgive…nothing to reassure—no memories of human sins or regrets of her afterlife, but she clings to Bella just the same, placing a value on her presence that can never be appraised._

_She's never had a past to remember. Never one free of tragedy to share. In Bella she has acquired a past well lived and traditions well honored…a family so loved that she found the strength to overcome her own predatory nature to be near them for every one of their fleeting mortal minutes. She sees a true sister…one to share a life she can't remember, and one to guide through an existence that immortality makes impossible to forget. The sight of them both—the one who can see my future, and the one who has become it—threatens to sweep away the last pieces of seven dark transformations. I hold them firmly in my mind. It keeps me grounded as she breaks away from Alice, and my future turns to ponder my past._

Up next: the very last chapter...eight Cullens down and only one left to justify...(tears up a little)


	28. Canto Final: Redemption

_After everything that I've done to try to avoid it, this is the last chapter of my first fic! Thank you so much to all of you who stuck with it from the beginning. A special thanks to **Lise Steiner**, who gave me some great reviews, more great encouragement, and has translated Purgatory to Potuguese! It was hard enough in English!_

_It's been so much fun and I've learned a lot along the way that I will use in the next thirty or so ideas that I have floating around in my head. I hope you will accompany me on some of those journeys too!_

_Thanks!_

* * *

She turns to me then, slowly, finally, and the smile on her face sweeps the room away. It's only one of the smiles that she has for the world…one of the thousands that make her so utterly indecipherable to me and to everyone else in her life, but this one is different from the rest. This smile has always been reserved for only me in our most private moments—calm and miraculous and absolutely certain—it pierces my heart in an instant.

She doesn't need to remove her shield for me to understand her acceptance. Her face reveals the truth that I had known somewhere all along. All of our crimes had already been imagined and magnified inside her head. They had already been contemplated and deliberated and slowly accepted long before the tragedies played out in starlight this night. Tonight had not been an unveiling. It had been a purging…

Her smile is enough to take away every last semblance of pain in the room. It's enough to bring my life into focus again and to make me see that it has always been fully intertwined with hers…to make me recognize the unpredictably intricate way that fate can intercede after a life lived so long without believing. I've always been destined for the flame inside those eyes. Every piece of my existence has somehow been in preparation for a time when her life would burn into me.

She approaches me now, and wraps her arms around me as dawn breaks, and the sunrise turns the room into a thousand dancing points of light. It is a sight that pales in comparison with the sensation of her touch.

"Thank you," she says to everyone, but her eyes see only me.

My breath catches hers and my skin trembles in tune with her voice. My mind folds peacefully around her silence as I try to meet the only eyes that can see past every defense that I have ever constructed and face down the absurdly stubborn will behind them that can dissolve my common sense. One smile to take away the pain, and one touch to set me free from the bonds that I have created for myself with my own shallow self loathing.

It all seems so simple now.

She is my forever. She has restored my humanity and has opened the door to a place that I had closed and locked. She has brought me back from my own world where there was only silence and darkness, and where time ran and never passed. She has brought everything back into focus again…the fragility and infinitely tiny fragments of reality that are worth everything and that I had not noticed since the permanent night that had fallen over me in New York. She has shown me passion again after a century of apathy and she has given me the greatest gift that I could ever have hoped for.

She made me a father.

A child who will barely age and never die. Small, sweet, drawn in porcelain perfection, so delicate and dangerous, she has called into question every doubt that I have ever had about eternity. How is it possible for a child so perfect and so beautiful…so compassionate and so self aware from before her birth to be born without a soul?

It is to our daughter that Bella turns now—that we all turn, fixating on a single glimmer of silver that stands out among millions in the room. It originates from a tiny locket hanging near our daughter's heart and holds tiny faces that she loves…a love so strong that it brought her to life and carried her mother into the afterlife. We watch her shift peacefully in her aunt's arms, follow the light fragment as it slides across the ceiling, and eight separate thought lines suddenly merge. One point of light among millions. She is that light in all of their lives now.

She is a past full of light for and aunt without one…an eternal living doll to dress and guide and a childhood to watch unfolding. A treasure to enrich every moment lived in the present and a future finally unseen and unwritten.

She is the light of here and now for a forever twenty-six year old grandmother…a product of a love that defied the rules of life and death, and a child that will grow with the wisdom of centuries and the quirks of us all. A justification for all of the pain and proof that the pieces of her soul were not given in vain.

She is a future full of light for a grandfather with over three hundred years of past…an impossible reversal of science and a reminder that every profound thing in this world can be combated with something as trivial as an infant's first smile. A miracle created by a son who had never believed in miracles…his own tiny contradiction.

She is the light that shines inside a world of fantasy created for her youngest uncle by another little girl long ago…always remembered in silver prisms like the ones that glisten softly from her skin. She is another teller of tales, though her stories are shown and not told. She fills them full of happiness, and love, and victory…and her hero's name is Emmett.

She is a reality full of light for an aunt who has never been able to face her own immortality…the dimpled, dark haired dream child of all of her selfish fantasies and her first selfless step into an unfamiliar world of sentiment. A connection to both mortality and eternity, and the proof that there is perfection behind every piece of existence.

She is a new understanding of the light for an uncle who has lived too long in darkness…a life among so much death and a hope in an eternity of hopelessness. Someone so tiny, responsible for so much change in the lives and emotions of the unchangeable, and a realization that those lives are the only things that are worth fighting for…dying for.

She is the light that shone at the end of everything and brought her mother back to me. She illuminated a path that had been impossible for me until I saw it inside her newborn eyes…redemption.

I stand with one dark haired angel in my arms, and another resting peacefully in front of my eyes—two lives well worth an eternity of deaths…with everyone I love around me contemplating the elusive miracle of sleep…with the dawn turning our skin to sunlight and turning our daughter's only to subtle shimmering moonlight. I stand and I watch in silence. And my breath does not expand my lungs, and my heart does not beat in my chest, and my mind is bound to the thoughts of a million others. But my soul lives on inside the ever-beating heart of my daughter, and the impenetrable mind of her mother.

Because I know that I have a soul now.

They've given me back my forever.

Fin.

* * *

_I would like to take my last words to recommend the sight Twilighted, and some of the stories there that I am in the process of reading, and that have absolutely blown me away. These ladies are readers, writers, and creators of worlds that you can lose yourself in way too easily. Most of them are on both sights, and I'll give their ff names where I can, but I haven't been able to find them all, so I am giving you some that can only be found on Twilight!_

_…be careful, reality gets shaky past this point!_

_Ithaca is Gorges—giselle-lx_

_Broken Doll—RowanMoon (Twilighted)_

_Gravity—Nightshade713_

_In My Power—Emily Fauve (Twilighted)_

_Thank you ladies, for taking the edge off my reality!_


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